


Of Ratts and Men

by LittleInkling64



Series: Of Ratts and Men Universe [1]
Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Close Friendship, Comfort, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Family, Fluff, Found Family, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Please note, Schizophrenia, Survival, he's not even in here, this is not cave johnson going crazy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:54:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 50,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23900053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleInkling64/pseuds/LittleInkling64
Summary: A world-class ballerina. A goofball engineer. A secretary turned monster. Told from the perspective of a madman grasping for sanity, this is a brand new take on the Portal 2 narrative. When Doug Rattmann runs into Chell during the Portal 2 narrative, it's a whole new ballgame. But is it enough to escape? Rated for general audiences, sometimes heavy themes. This story is now complete. Thanks to all the lovely readers for 1k+ hits!
Series: Of Ratts and Men Universe [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2177826
Comments: 18
Kudos: 83





	1. A Rude Awakening

Every day was more or less the same. Beans that had long ago become nothing more than a tasteless paste. Perhaps a muddied mural on the wall, capturing the swirl of reality. Sometimes he would come upon a mug and in a sudden flash of clarity, a name and face would accompany it, hovering anxiously in the air before his eyes. Their eyes would watch him then, boring into the deepest fibers of him. He could never leave it—leave them—behind.

_Mind the gap._

He smiled, briefly, reaching back to give his cube friend an affectionate pat. He leapt over the small cap in the catwalks. But his smile disappeared as his mind returned to the task at hand.

He’d woken from stasis some hours ago, a hideously puckered scar on his leg where the bullet wound had been. He strongly suspected that the turret bullet was still inside, but there was little he could do. He was walking well enough, though there was a curious ache that he suspected would never leave.

Perhaps he’d been asleep long enough that it was all over. Perhaps she’d escaped and reached the surface—awoken out of her slumber during a routine exercise wake-up and used that peculiar tenacity to find her own way out. Without… _Her_ to make things difficult, nothing could stand in her way and she’d be out in no time. She probably already was.

But he had to know.

_Prepare for the worst, but hope for the best._ His cube friend suggested. He nodded mutely, making his way to the relaxation vaults. Even if she hadn’t escaped, he could wake her and lead her out.

Perhaps he would even have a chance to apologize for putting her back in.

Everything was a smear of utilitarian greys, occasionally broken up by the odd exposed panel of moldy yellow insulation. It must have been a long time since he’d gone to sleep and woken up; the facility was as run down as he’d ever seen it, and there was a thick layer of dust over everything.

But when he arrived at the vaults, the only dust disturbed was by his own two feet. The boxes remained untouched, apart from the horrible, reeking smell of death and endless, musty sleep.

_17C, that’s the one she was in, remember?_

He nodded. But vault 17C wasn’t there.

The entire space where it should be—had been—was empty. Metal hung from the mounting station at jagged angles, evidence of some violent and sudden movement.

She’d been moved. But they when and where of it escaped him.

_Could She…could She have woken up?_

He dared not consider the thought, but his errant mind had other plans and went rampant. If She _had_ woken up, Her first thought would surely be revenge. Her black box auto-save feature would practically guarantee that she would vividly remember being taken down; he would know—he had helped to build the feature. And if her previous behavior was anything to go by, he was fairly certain that She would engage in revenge at any cost, no matter how petty.

He’d heard the things She’d said and the way She had so mercilessly treated her most durable test subject. She was ruthless in the extreme, and with the aid of experience, nothing would keep Her from crushing the young woman without a second thought.

He had to find out where She’d taken the test subject, if indeed she was still alive. It was his fault after all that she was still in here, and he hadn’t starved himself of air and sun just to give up now.

_I’m sure she’s…fine._

Even his cube friend sounded concerned, and it usually was his sole source of optimism. He had to step carefully. If She was indeed awake, then what semblance of safety he might have had was now gone.

-

He was nearly to the central AI chamber when the lights turned on. Scrambling for cover, he listened intently, glancing rather warily at the ruby-eyed cameras beginning to perk up. He heard the faintest sound of panicked voices—no, one voice—perhaps accented?

He knew for a fact that there was a monitor station just a few doors down from his catwalk. If he could just get there, he could access the chamber cameras and get a better idea of what was going on. Assuming he could get past the cameras along the catwalk without being seen. And assuming that all of the equipment was still functional enough to, well, function.

The camera above him gleamed and snarled. He flinched as it snapped at him. With a violent shake of his head, he clasped his temples with shaking fingers. He couldn’t lose his grip on reality. Not now, when it _counted_.

The camera began a movement cycle, rotating gently several inches to the left. Then to the right. He caught the rhythm of the camera’s movement, waited, then sprang. His bad leg buckled under the sudden force, but he ignored the pain. He ran, sprinting wildly to the fourth door in the corridor. It was locked, but he forced it open with a horrible creaking of aging metal. He fell into the room, the cube on his back tumbling free and rolling awkwardly across the floor.

_Ow ow ow ow owww…_

“Sorry.” He murmured to his cube friend, but he had to do this quickly.

Sitting in a chair that released small mushroom cloud of dust, making him cough, he coaxed the old computer to life. He hadn’t accessed one of Aperture’s desktop computers since, well…it didn’t bear thinking about.

[Password:]

He pressed his lips together tightly.

_I know it._

He turned and listened.

“Thank you, friend.” He paused for the barest second and gave his cube friend a pat.

[Password accepted] [Welcome user Dr_D_Rattman] [It has been 374,000 days, 8 hours, and 17 minutes since you last logged in]

There was no time to let such a number sink in. Someone’s life might just very well be at stake.

[Accessing camera_01_central_ai_chamber]

A camera feed popped into view, showing her just as he remembered. Or perhaps as he didn’t. It was hard to tell from the feed, but she looked well enough. A core, of all things, was plugged into the central power control dock and waving its handles wildly.

And chattering away, frantically.

“I don’t—I do—okay, here’s the plan. Just act natural, just act natural—we’ve done _nothing_ wrong here—hello!”

A chill ran down his spine and made itself quite at home in the pit of his stomach. Her optic, dirty now and slick with grime, rose unsteadily from the earthy floor. It reminded him far too much of an old flick he’d seen about zombies—the insistent, persisting movement that was unsteady and uncoordinated but so very, _very_ unrelenting.

Her optic raised itself to the level of the test subject and her core companion. It focused for a bit and the entire grubby faceplate tilted mildly to one side:

_“Oh. It’s_ you. _”_ Her tone was heavy with unbridled passive aggression. _“It’s been a looooong time. I’ve been really busy being dead. You know, after you_ murdered me? _”_

So She did remember. He hated being right.

“Wait—you did what?” The young woman’s core companion interjected, aghast. Suddenly he recognized that voice. At least, that simulated version of a voice.

_If she’s being guided by that particular core, then we’re all in big trouble._

“Y-yes.” The strangled answer managed to escape his mouth, but he couldn’t speak.

_“Look, we both said a lot of things that you’re going to regret. But I think we can put our differences aside. For science. You monster.”_

He croaked as She picked both the woman and the core up with multi-service claws. She flicked the core away like so much lint and held the woman over the emergency intelligence incinerator and— _oh no._

She was going to die, and there was nothing he could do.

_“I must say, since you went to trouble of waking me up, you must_ really _love to test. Don’t worry, I love it too. And now I’m on to all your little tricks.”_

_No—_

_“So there’s nothing to stop you from testing. For the rest of your life.”_

The claw dropped her and the young woman disappeared from view.

But for the first time in as many minutes, he breathed a sigh of relief. If She was intending to exact Her revenge the long, painful way, then there was still a chance he could save her.

He could make things right.


	2. A Chance Meeting

He was crawling through a particularly tight vent when it hit. The world spun violently, swirling together in lurid display of black and orange and blue and yellow and red, red, red, _red…_

The red resolved itself into a perfectly circular LED light with a dozen lines radiating outward from a cold, empty red center. White swathed around it and black legs, stubby and sharp, extended to bear the shape up.

“Hello-o?” He gasped, struggling to breathe against the heavy weight of fear sitting in his chest. The walls were closing in tighter and tighter—

“Could you come over here?”

He crawled like a madman, not caring that a loose screw snagged the shredded remains of his lab coat and tore a long strip from it. He left the scrap of grimy fabric behind.

“Dispensing product.” The sounds of gunfire, echoing and _fake_ and yet so very _real_ , surrounded him, drowning him in the sound of death and destruction.

_It’s not real! Keep going!_

He could barely hear his cube friend for all the commotion, but it was too quiet and the violent _ratta-tatta-tatta_ was just too loud…

He gasped—an open-mouthed, raggedy breath like a fish out of water—and fell out of the vent onto the floor of tiny storage room. Clarity returned like a splash of cold water, leaving him shivering and cold on the floor. A mop fell over his head, crowing his already shaggy, dirty hair with a fresh layer of dust and disintegrated mop fibers. He coughed.

But it was over, for the moment. These fits came and went, sometimes worse than others. Sometimes his cube friend could pull him out with its consistent encouragement. Sometimes it couldn’t.

_You’re alright. There wasn’t a turret. But be careful. You have to take care of yourself if you’re going to help her._

He nodded, swallowing noiselessly. His throat with dry and he needed more water. There was a decent store that he’d stockpiled somewhere above the old test chamber seventeen. The sooner he got up there, the better; he couldn’t be sure of anything anymore, given that _She_ was awake.

He rose, slowly, shakily, and adjusted the strap holding his cube friend to his back. The smooth, cool weight against his back was a comforting presence, and he reached back to stroke the raised corners.

_We should get moving._

“Yes, yes right.”

The single rusted door leading from the room protested weakly to his kick and swung open with a nasty creak. Beyond, the flickering lighting of the old offices beckoned. No place was truly safe, not with the ruby-eyed cameras that speckled the walls, but at the very least, the offices were beyond Her control. A place She could see but never touch.

In the flickers of the fluorescent lights, he caught snatches of figures, dark and nebulous, scurrying away from him. He flinched when one got close, and he caught a vivid vision of some long-gone coworker. Debra, was it? Some poor underpaid secretary who he’d barely noticed and yet who still flitted in his peripheral vision?

It was a pity, he thought. But he had a finite amount of pity, and Debra was one of thousands. Besides, she was dead, and this test subject, this woman was _alive_. He had to help her, even if that meant treading heavily though the dust of many Debra’s and Greg’s and heaven only knew.

He staggered from room to room in a heavy, guilt-induced haze.

_It’s not your fault. You were only doing your job._

“But it is, it is.” He muttered, shaking his head like a wet dog.

_Even if it is, you can make amends. Help this woman. Do the right thing._

“The…the right thing. Right…right.” He pressed tired, paint-splattered fingers to his temples and tried to massage his aching head.

If She was planning on testing that woman before disposing of her, then She would surely be putting her through the preliminary test chambers, at least until She could get new ones up and running. Given his own personal experiences with _Her_ , he wouldn’t put it past Her to run old chambers just for the pettiness of it, but he knew She was too desperate for fresh data. If anyone would know, he would, given that he’d helped code the function.

Traversing through the old offices, he eventually found another vent. Prying the thin slatted cover up, he was met with the smell of stale air. A few disintegrated screws fell to the floor unheeded, and he unstrapped the cube from his back to push it in front of him in the tunnel. He clambered in after it and began the tedious crawl on his hands and knees, butting the cube with his head. Considering he hadn’t had a haircut since…well, before, he had an ample amount of cushioning against the cube’s hard surfaces.

_Be careful. Remember some of these vents aren’t very strong and they could—_

Whatever his cube friend said next was lost in the utter confusion. He was falling— _falling?_ —and the awful wrenching of metal was all around him. He landed hard—on what, he didn’t know—and rolled to the floor. Flopping on his back and breathing hard, he found himself in another office.

He puffed, trying to get his breath back as he stared up at bland white walls and a similarly uninteresting ceiling. When at last he could rise, he scrambled to get his bearings. Just in front of him lay two broken window panels with rows of jagged glass sticking up like teeth in a ghoulish mouth. Beyond them, unsullied by the foggy glass, lay a scene of extraordinary beauty quite unlike anything he’d seen in a long time.

Vines trawled from a hole in ceiling to cover the walls of the test chamber. Beneath them, greenish moss crept up the edges of the individual panels, staining them a gentle lime color. Inexplicably, the richness of the color soothed him. Sunlight poured from the same hole, thought he could tell that it was several hundred feet up—far too high to reach.

It was a far cry from the tranquility garden his therapist had—did that really exist or had it perhaps been a dream—but the poor excuse for foliage was _alive_ and _real_. He could smell earth, if his nose didn’t deceive him, wet and rich.

He got the sudden, strong urge to touch it—this other scant form of life. It was so beautiful and green and _living_ and the farthest thing from this mechanical h—

His hand slipped. He lost his balance, tumbling wildly through space for the second time that day. Somewhere, somehow, he knew he was bleeding because there were shards of glass in his arms and something had scratched his face. He grabbed a swath of vines on the way down (surely that was why he had half a dozen shredded leaves in his hands).

But none of that mattered, because he looked up, and there she was.

Miss Chell [REDACTED] herself, locking eyes with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the chaos. Hope you enjoyed the chapter, and there'll be more to come eventually. If you'd like to see a more up-to-date version of the story, I tend to update on Fanfiction.net first. Toodles.


	3. Welcome to the Enrichment Center...

He gaped at her, shaken by her hard stare. He opened his mouth, any number of apologies and explanations ready to pour forth in a piteous stream—but she moved so fast he couldn’t get a single word out. In the space of a few seconds, she’d clapped a hand over his mouth and fired two portals with the other.

They sat in uncomfortable silence for the longest possible second as the distant sound of a security camera _clanking_ to the floor was heard. Knocked off the wall by the physical inconsistency of having an interdimensional portal placed behind it.

_“What was that? I hope you haven’t gone back to that tiresome habit of destroying vital testing apparatus. According to my protocol, I am required to punish such childish behavior after repeated infractions. Hmm, that’s funny. It doesn’t say how many infractions. I suppose they left that up to testing supervisor discretion.”_

_“It’s interesting actually, the recommended punishment involves revoking privileges. Perhaps we could start with lighting. Or air. Just an interesting note.”_

_She_ left them in dead, bitter silence. He shook lightly, trying desperately not to vibrate the young woman’s hand with the violent shivering of his body. He shouldn’t be surprised by Her cruelty—or the casual callousness of it—but all the same, he was shaken by just how… _vindictive_ She sounded. This was more than the blind rage they’d encountered all those years ago, fitting Her with cores. This was a petty, human hunger for revenge.

And not swift revenge either. He could sense She was playing the long game with this; She would use this young woman—this Chell [REDACTED]—for every last iota of data She could squeeze from her, _then_ She would do away with her. But who knew how long that could take. Given Her near-immortal computerized mind, he didn’t think it would be anything less than a lifetime.

But now Chell was pulling him up, waving a hand in front of his face, giving him a look that was all at once expressionless and questioning. Sharp grey eyes skewered him with their laser-sharp gaze, probing and searching.

She didn’t trust him. He could see that from the subtle, suspicious slant of her eyes. And in that moment, he desperately, _urgently_ wanted her to trust him. He wanted to open his mouth, explain that he was the one who had led her out. That was him— _that was me!_ He opened his mouth again, but she waved a hand, shushing him. Maybe…maybe that was for the best. If he explained, he would have to make her understand that he had given her hope and desperation out of the same hand. He would have to explain that the hands that had painted arrows and notes and reminders that she _wasn’t alone_ were the same hands that had moved her to the top of the testing list,

With a steely look in her eyes, she solved the puzzle fast enough to make his head spin and then she was pulling him along again.

When they reached the threshold of the exit door, he stalled, digging in his heels. The door loomed taller as he gazed in transfixed horror. The cool gentle blue burned bright, burning into his eyes, warning that the calming color was a lie. _A lie a lie a lie—_

Chell jerked his arm. She didn’t speak but pointed ahead to the short flight of steel stairs leading down to an elevator. He shook his head, unable to do anything else. Going into the elevator was the surest way to throw himself into an incinerator. His death would be a slow round of neurotoxin. If he was _lucky_.

Her stare turned hard, but she stopped, folding her arms—muscular arms, scarred from discouragement beams and scratched from this latest test—and she waited. It was suddenly clear to him that she was waiting for him to suggest something better than simply taking Her path.

But what could he do? Where could they go? These chambers might be overrun, but there were no openings in the panels that they could reach from here, even with the aid of an ASHPD. Besides, even if they could reach them, it was a stretch even for the most creative mind to consider squeezing through to the areas beyond.

But then she fired off two portals again, and he flinched at the otherworldly sound. He turned, and she had placed one portal on the wall next to them, and the other—

_Brilliant woman._ In the office he had just left, an orange portal glimmered softly. What leaves and vines he hadn’t dragged off of the walls in his abrupt descent shone with sharp orange reflections that stabbed into his eyes. He blinked for a second, trying to stop the golden-orange light from twisting into goldfish swimming wildly through the leaves and vines—

Chell grabbed his arm and all of a sudden, they were back in the office again, tumbling through the impossibility of portals.

_There you are! I was worried._ His cube friend chirped to him, relieved.

“I was a little worried too.” He answered without thinking and turned to find Chell looking at him warily. With a sudden realization, the thought occurred to him that she couldn’t hear his cube friend the way he did. Even so, he took a minute to readjust the cube in his sling.

_“Maybe you_ are _listening to me. But for the record, you don’t have to go that slowly. We’ve got a lot of testing to do after all, and only sixty more years to do it.”_

Chell froze, and for the briefest moment, he caught the unmistakable look of fear in her eyes like a flash of lightning. Then it was gone, and the hardened steel expression returned, molding her face into stone. She turned to him and hauled him to his feet with a cold efficiency.

_“What are you doing in there? I realize you are a lunatic, but you may have just set the bar lower. Oh, it seems you’ve destroyed all the cameras._ Thanks _for that.”_

There was the whirr of machinery, and he watched in horrified fascination as several panels extended to allow multiservice arms to fasten more ruby-eyed cameras to the walls. Then they were all looking at him, boring into his flesh with red-hot rage and fiery teeth—

Chell opened the office door and they ran as a synthesized scream of rage bellowed throughout the chamber. He didn’t know where they were going, and neither apparently did she, because they reached a junction and she hesitated. He saw her eyes go ice cold with a detached sort of look as she tried to summon decisiveness.

But he recognized the corridor. With a sudden shock that dragged a choking laugh from his throat, he nudged her arm and pointed to the left corridor. It led to more offices, still a lot way from the surface, but they were their safest bet all things considered.

_“Where did you go? I hope you haven’t been playing with any rats. I was in the middle of an extermination cycle when you had your, well,_ incident _. I suppose I’ll have to take care of that too—I’ve got a long list of things you interrupted, in fact. Not that you care. In the meantime, why don’t you come back, finish one more test.”_

They were on the catwalks between the chambers. Just to their right, another chamber opened like the maw of a metal beast, gaping and sterile white. Three turrets, freshly dispensed, wobbled a little before focusing their crimson beams.

“Hello-o?”

“Deploying.”

Gunfire split the relative silence as he was violently dragged along the left pathway. Chell was all-out sprinting now, seemingly unhindered by the springy heels of her long-fall boots. Most of the new test subjects had fallen on their faces within minutes of putting them on—the male test subjects more often than the female, since experience with high-heeled shoes seemed to help a little. But here she was, sprinting with the ease of an experienced gymnast. Guilt settled itself at the base of his stomach again. There was a good reason she was experienced.

They reached the next set of offices in a flurry of pounding feet and heavy breathing (mostly on his part). Chell didn’t stop to catch her breath until she had closed at least two doors between them and that terrible _voice_. Then, sliding to the floor with sudden exhaustion, she sat panting, even as she rested the ASHPD across her knees to keep it close by.

He sat as well, rubbing his shoulders where his cube friend had thumped against the muscles as they ran.

_Sorry. I can’t help it._

“I know, I know.” He patted the cube affectionately, even as he sighed.

Chell looked at him funny again, the mask dropping for the slightest moment to shoot him a look of confusion. When he stared back, the look shifted to something like…recognition? She scooted closer, but not too close, and pointed to his hands. He held them out obligingly, and she pointed to the paint splatters. Her face warmed, and in the most unexpected motion, she hugged him, hard.

He was taken aback for a second, but in the end, he let it happen. So much time spent alone had dulled his hunger for human interaction, for human touch. A hug was too much to ask for and yet it was exactly the thing he hadn’t realized he was missing. So he hugged back, with the grip of a survivor.

But it felt _too_ good. Too wonderful to be truly real. He pulled away, trying his best to cover his uneasiness with a smile. She smiled back and gestured to the floor, pretending to draw. He nodded again, but his mind was wandering.

She knew him, remembered him. She knew that he had helped her. The thought warmed him from the inside out, knowing that he was the one…the one who…

_The one who also pitted her against Her?_

He didn’t dare speak to his cube friend, but the answer resonated in his mind: she still didn’t know. She didn’t know that the whole reason she was in this mess was his fault.

Even from the moment she became a test subject, it was his fault.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so we're back. Here's chapter three and I hope y'all enjoy. I'll be honest, not sure when the next chapter will be up. I have more free time on my hands, but unless I get inspiration, it's kinda hard to write.


	4. Second Chance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again all you lovely readers! Really excited by the positive response to this story. Since one reader said they would prefer longer chapters and I try to please here, enjoy a bit of a longer chapter! Also! Big long note at the end about the future of this story.  
> I don't want to delay reading too much here at the beginning so I'll keep this short, but please do take a look at it.

She didn’t speak. For some reason, it surprised him, even after everything. After weeks and months, he never seen her once open her mouth, except to let loose a soundless cry of pain. She had never spoken a single word—out of spite, he presumed, for _Her_ —but even now, she did not utter a single word.

Even to him, though he supposed that wasn’t any great indicator. After all, he wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of goodness and honesty.

_You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. At least you’ve tried to make up for your shortcomings._

He wanted to reply, to say again, ‘even so…’, but he didn’t dare. Not with Chell watching.

She motioned gently to the vent, pointing to the dim ochre lights beyond. They had agreed, after some deliberation through exaggerated pantomime and signing, to keep moving as much as possible, from office to office. Otherwise, they were at risk of _Her_ blocking their way with turrets—or worse still, the two little testing initiative robots that she was now in possession of.

Much as he wouldn’t call the two robots intelligent—especially when compared with Her near-astronomical, computer-aided cleverness—they were far more mobile than She was. Unlike Her royal psychotic self, they were not grounded to a single chamber, and with a set of ASHPD’s at their disposal, they were a formidable threat.

Of course, as he thought about it dryly, he wasn’t exactly in a position to hand out mental diagnoses—

Chell signaled to him, and a flash of a frown crossed her features, like a wild hare. No expression stayed put for long on her face, he was noticing. It was if there was an unconscious desire to leave her face as blank as possible, to keep anyone from guessing the thoughts bouncing inside her skull. Goodness knew she went to enough trouble as it was by not speaking, and her blank, unreadable expression seemed to be simply another precaution. He couldn’t blame her—didn’t blame her—but still, it felt strange. He’d come across the first human to survive in years, and her person was as impassive as any of the dozen thousand subsystems scuttling around.

He followed her, regardless. He could not let her lead—wouldn’t let her, since it was the least he could do to lead her out at last—but he did not fear her going first through the tunnel. She was a survivor, in the upmost meaning of the word, and at the very least, she had taken down a good hundred more turrets that he could ever claim to have done.

She entered the vent, glanced back as best she could in the cramped quarters to quirk an eyebrow at him. He nodded, taking his cube friend from his sack. Placing it before him, he began his usual ritual of nosing the blunt cuboid forward. She didn’t comment, as usual, but he could sense that she pitied his unusual attachment. He wished he could make her hear the sweet, tender little voice that came from it, encouraging him in everything and warning him of danger. If only she could hear it! She would understand, perhaps…

But suppose she had seen his scribbles on the walls? She had pointed to his hands, clearly recognizing the smudges of brightly-colored gel in relation to his propensity for murals. She seemed to like him well enough, probably because she so foolishly believed that he was a harmless soul, capable only of providing aid to others.

Oh how wrong she was. How wrong he wished she wasn’t. He was poison, a poisonous man with poisoned hands that corrupted everything they touched—

_“Really now, you truly are paranoid. Honestly, an evil AI out to get you and watching your every move? How believable is that?”_

Her voice was echoing in his brain, far too loud and close and _true—_

_It’s not true! She is evil, and any paranoia you have is more than justified; she’s hunted you for years now._

His cube friend tried, and it failed. It was too much, too loud, too _close_ to his head and his ears—

Suddenly they were at the end of the vent in another office and Chell was pulling the cube away and he wanted to snatch it back—she grabbed him and dragged him from the vent. She sat him down, on the floor, a haze of checkered black and white tiles—tiled, like the diner in his hometown—full of good food just like his mother’s linoleum-floored kitchen—his mother who was surely long dead by now—

And on and on it spiraled. No sooner was he on one thought that his mind had snatched another one out of the fog by the most tenuous of connections and run away with it. He couldn’t quite hear Chell shuffling around to face him. He couldn’t quite see her hand waving in front of his face. 

Black and pink and orange swirled and he was tumbling down, down, down into a whirlwind of color that ended in black—

* * *

He woke, some time later, to find Chell asleep not far from him. She was curled up tight, arms tucked in and legs folded neatly. A far cry from his own sprawled out form, generously bedecking the tiled floor in limbs.

He rubbed a hand over his face, dragging the skin down with the motion. At this point, if his beard grew any longer, he would have to tie it back with twine. They were in another office—not one he recognized—and he apparently had forced them to stop with his…his episode.

He berated himself. Here he was, trying to help her to the surface, and his own mind was working against him. Perhaps it would be best if he just pointed her in the correct direction and left her to it; after all, she was resourceful enough that he could see. Yes…yes, perhaps she was better off without him. But he would tell her, or else she might go looking for him, which would doom her, surely.

He coughed. Instantly she was alert, her eyes and ears keen; if they had been anything like a fox’s, they would have perked up sharply. Nonsense; she wasn’t a fox, just a young woman in a jumpsuit, which weren’t related…except perhaps in color. And cunning, now that he thought about it. But now wasn’t really the time.

“I—I—” he couldn’t work out how to say it, “I think this is where we part ways.”

The woman didn’t even blink, and not a muscle in her face twitched. She shifted, sitting upright slowly, as if in deep thought. Slowly, steadily, _surely_ , she shook her head. She pointed to him, gestured to herself, and pointed up.

“Oh—oh no, of course, you’ll still be going to the surface, just without me.”

She shook her head again, and her calm façade was cracked the slightest bit by a frown. She gestured to each of them again, then pointed above them, vehemently this time. Her face went hard, and he suddenly swallowed, intimidated to be on the receiving end of that tenacious grit for once. It was a shame She wasn’t more human; if She was, a single glare like this surely would have solved their problem a great deal quicker.

“If you…if you knew, well…everything, I don’t think you would want to.” He managed to get out.

Chell crawled over, and she tugged on his labcoat. Then she pointed, unabashed, at his tag, which was on its last leg, hanging onto his threadbare coat by the thinnest and most precarious of threads. The very fact that it continued to grasp the edge of his collar fold and hadn’t dropped already half a dozen times was ludicrous. In this moment, he wished with every fiber of his being that it had—or better, that he had ripped it off himself and thrown it into some great gorge until the misty bottom swallowed it whole.

She opened her mouth, seemed to think better of it, and pointed again, going so far as to touch the tag itself, pressing it into his long-rumpled shirt. He tried not to flinch, though the touch felt akin to an electric shock, running through his bones.

Her eyes were gentle, but he could see a glimmer of iron underneath. He got the sudden, firm impression that she would keep prodding until he told. For her own safety and his sanity…perhaps…perhaps he should.

“I…I used to work for Aperture.” He began.

She nodded.

“I was an engineer. I worked on the…I worked on the…”he swallowed, “…the GLaDOS project.”

For the first time, the woman drew back, her expression aghast. If he could guess at what she might say, he would assume it’d be along the lines of, ‘how did you end up with _Her_?’”

“I know, I know…” he fisted a hand against his stomach, trying to knead the anxious knot there, “…but dear God forgive me! I didn’t know! I didn’t _know_ …” his head bent, he nearly wept.

“I didn’t know what they were trying to do—what they _did_ do—I didn’t know what _She_ was becoming until it was too late. By then, we were already halfway done with the cores, and no one listened to me, and it was too late to shut Her down anyways. She was worming Her way into the systems—we couldn’t keep her out. After all she was supposed to control the whole thing…why would they put safeguards to keep her out?” He laughed bitterly.

“Why take any precautions? This is _Science!_ Not about why—never about why! Always about why not!” He kept laughing, unable to stop, and he kept laughing until the tears began running down his face.

“Why _not_ give her neurotoxin—all in the name of precious, _demented_ science of course! And oh…oh G—I didn’t even stay. I couldn’t even stay to hold their hands when they were dying, because _She_ was watching—she’d always be watching, and I couldn’t…I couldn’t…”

He managed to look up. “There are thirty _thousand_ dead in this facility, and they are all on my shoulders. And you…you,” he hesitated, shaking, but Chell drew close again. With that inscrutable expression, she nodded softly and touched his shoulder.

He swallowed around the swollen lump in his throat. “And you…you were almost one of them.” He finished in a whisper, terrified to see the taciturn female before him explode in anger. He had seen her do it once, not with words but deeds, not with expression but with crystal clear, _furious_ body language. Having experienced a taste of her displeasure before, even in a teaspoon-sized portion, he was not eager to be buried beneath a full dose.

“I-I suggested you for testing. Somebody else had given you a flyer at a company event…something…Smythe was his name, I think.” He restlessly picked at his nails. “He’d mentioned you were in need of some cash…he’d said you were in good physical condition, being a-a…a ballet dancer, I’m not sure.”

Chell seemed to be taken aback at this, and she abruptly stopped to pull off her long-fall boots. She wore slight blue socks with the Aperture logo hatefully printed across them in faded grey thread. They were nearly worn through, and she carefully peeled one back from her right foot with the greatest possible care; it wasn’t as if she could easily find another pair.

Slowly, methodically, she examined her foot. The skin was thick with calluses, centered around her toes. He felt rude for staring, but Chell pinched his sleeve and pointed at a particularly nasty callus, the faintest of smiles growing on her face. The mark of someone who kept on their toes for a living. No wonder she had survived all this.

He hazarded a question. “Did you…did you not know that?”

Chell silently began replacing her footwear. Adjusting the straps of her long-fall boots thoughtfully, she slowly shook her head.

“You don’t remember…anything?”

She shook her head.

“And…talking? Is that just, ah, er, a preference?”

Chell sighed. He backed off. “It’s alright, you don’t have to answer. I don’t blame you. We’re all…we’re all a little crazy. What was the Wonderland quote? ‘We’re all mad here,’ I think.”

Chell huffed, seeming frustrated, and she quickly scanned the room with that sharp, analytical gaze. At last, she seized upon an old ballpoint pen, dusty with clouded plastic and ink that was most likely dry. At the very least, when she tried to write with it, the ink wouldn’t run, but he could see it sloshing around in the pen’s inner compartment. Chell sighed, and with sudden force she snapped the pen in half, splattering ink all over herself.

Taking as much of it in her hands as she could, she wrote in painstaking letters on the dusty floor. When she had finished, she leaned back on her haunches, looking at him again with that humorless expression.

And on the floor, inscribed crudely in fat, round letters:

“Forgot how.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right, so I know I've said in the past that this story is quite dependent on inspiration, which is in short supply for me unless I have a longer plan in mind.
> 
> That said, I have a proposal in mind. For a while now, I've had a lot of ideas and notes concerning a final long fic in my fanfic career (if you can call it that)-my own "Blue Sky", if you will. (Not to say I'm as good as Wafflestories, but I think you get the idea.) Point is, my idea involves expanding this story to include Wheatley and Caroline and their respective backstories. And yes, as you might have guessed from this chapter, this story idea also involves Chell being a former top-notch ballerina who was swept into testing along with a dozen other astronauts, war heroes, and Olympians.
> 
> In short, this would be my own take on the ending of Portal 2, with some cannon material adjustments along the way.
> 
> For those of you who have enjoyed Rattman's perspective as an unreliable narrator, don't worry. Regardless of changes, this aspect of the story will probably stay the same, since I've enjoyed writing Doug's point of view. However, as someone who mostly ships Chelly, I'm afraid this expansion would mean that any relationship between Chell and Doug will probably not go beyond close friendship. Still, I am a strong supporter of platonic relationships, and even if a relationship isn't romantic, I still believe it can have closeness and depth.
> 
> All that to say, I open the floor to you guys. What would you like to see from this story in the future, and what do you think of this proposal? Since you guys have been really nice about supporting this story, I hope you'll take the time to let me know your thoughts, opinions, and ideas.
> 
> Toodles,
> 
> LittleInkling64


	5. The Show Must Go On

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all. Sorry this is up a bit late, but it's finished and I have a date for the next chapter! See the summary for details, and I hope y'all enjoy. If you do enjoy, please consider leaving a comment/review, since those comments have really encouraged me to keep writing this story. With that, read on!

_He was in a theater, dimly lit with suffused golden light that streamed from the stage. But the stage lights themselves were nothing to the glow coming from the girl herself. Beyond the grace of her arms arching over her head in perfect curves, beyond the delicate layers of her skirt fanning out around her in perfect circles, there was a fiery glow that blazed from her eyes, calm as they might first appear. It was this that made her glow so brightly, enough to light an entire stage by herself._

_He glanced over. His colleague, Stephen, was staring with glasses slipping and mouth slightly ajar. A blush was clearly building in his face, even in the dim lighting. He chuckled. Heaven help the man; Stephen was utterly and without a doubt smitten. He pitied his colleague’s chances—considering they were here on a whim and had nothing approaching VIP status, it seemed unlikely that he would get the chance to share even two words with the woman—_

_They were in a diner now, several blocks from the theater, and—sweet mercy—there she was again. She stood against the counter, chatting lightly with the woman behind it, and the cashier handed her a styrofoam box that squeaked horribly as she took it. She winced at the sound but smiled at the cashier before she moved to leave._

_In the surprise move of the century, Stephen Symthe—the quiet, dry, academic doctor of software engineering who had about the charisma of a plastic spoon—walked over awkwardly and asked if she’d like to sit with them, or did she have to go? Because if she did, that was fine—perfectly fine!—they just saw her in the show and wanted to congratulate her. He chuckled again to himself, sipping mildly at his coffee._

_He nearly spit out his drink. Stephen had managed to convince the prima ballerina to sit with them and she was standing right in front of him._

_“Hello. How do you do?” She asked, in the softest voice he had ever heard. Soft, yes, but the fire was still there in her eyes, smoldering away with the constant threat that it could turn into blazing inferno, should she find the need._

_“Er, fine, thanks. And you?” He stuttered a little, caught off guard._

_“Good. Tired, if I’m honest.”_

_“Oh I’d imagine—I mean, you saw the kind of tricks she pulled off, didn’t you Doug? Oh! It was just—just so, so—just absolutely fantastic! How d’ya manage it?” Stephen asked, following his ramble. The woman opened her mouth, paused, and Stephen took the moment to cut back in—_

_“Loads of training, I’d imagine. Is it hard? The training, that is. Never could figure out the dancing thing, but then I’ve got clodhoppers for feet. Not like you—quite the advantage there.”_

_They both looked down at their feet, and he cringed at his colleague’s speech. It could easily be taken as rude, and if the woman did react negatively, he couldn’t exactly blame her. Stephen might have a doctorate or two, but he was about as adept at small talk as a rhinoceros was at, well, ballet._

_But the woman laughed. It quickly shifted from a delicate laugh, like soft chimes, to a snorting giggle that drew the eyes of a few of the other patrons. Stephen blushed as well, shifting his feet uneasily._

_“Do you…er, well, do you want to sit with us?” He gestured awkwardly to a booth that had just emptied._

_The woman nodded, and he slid from his stool to walk as a trio to the empty booth. They sat, and he ordered more coffee for the three of them, as Stephen went right on talking—_

* * *

He woke, greeted by the immediate wish that he could go back to sleep. His head ached, his leg ached, and as everything came rushing back, something deep within his chest ached. He remembered talking to Chell, telling her something of her past. Something…the diner. The ballerina.

He glanced over to his left and caught sight of a pair of long-fall boots, recently discarded. A pair of socks, grey and stiff with sweat. And beyond them, framed by the glow of sterile, cold fluorescent lighting, was the silhouette of a woman en pointe on bare toes.

Slowly, thoughtfully, she raised her right leg, extended it to an absurd degree behind her head without the slightest tremor of straining muscles. It was beautiful, the entire thing, not so much because she was beautiful, but because for the slightest and smallest of moments, everything disappeared. For the smallest of moments, there was no Aperture, no GLaDOS, no past, no future. There was only the present moment. He felt a remarkable sense of calm, lost for the moment in a sense of disjointed magic, curious and yet pleasant.

Then it ended. She caught him staring and quickly came back into the main room. The fire stayed put in her eyes, however, and it blazed brighter as she quickly put her socks and long-fall boots back on. After a minute, she reached over with a firm hand and hauled him upright. Dusting herself off, she pulled a few loose strands of hair behind her ears and nodded to him with a business-like air.

Except, there was something slightly different about the air of her. Something…vaguely happy. He nearly smiled. Nearly. He had done that. He had given her the missing piece she had been grasping for, the puzzle piece to click into the place to bridge the gap between the now and the _then._

They moved as one to the door, ready to move on. He heard a distinctly plastic crunch and looked down to the pen from hours earlier beneath his foot. The ink had long ago dried in a pool of navy blue ink that lay flat and dull against the faded black and white tiles. He lifted his foot, shaking the plastic shards from the nearly flattened treads, and went on.

Beyond the office, they barely got three steps down the catwalk when they were attacked by a bright blue light. A surge of words, about as friendly to the ear as a jackhammer going full blast, soon followed.

“Oh G—see I knew I’d find you! Bet you’re wondering how I survived? Yeah—well, it’s a long story, but I’ve gotta say, you’re cleverer than you look! I didn’t think you’d get out on your own!”

The bright light, clearly coming from the Intelligence Dampening Core, suddenly shrunk in what might have passed for a sheepish expression as the core raised its handles like eyebrows.

“Er, well, you see, I didn’t quite mean—well you see, the thing is I—”

“You can stop now, ID core.” He didn’t mean anything cruel, but he suddenly regretted making the comment when Chell turned on him with something approaching a savage expression. She caught the startled look he was sure was on his face, and suddenly her face molded itself into something gentler.

The thought clicked. This core—this construct—was probably the first voice she’d heard since she woke up, considering he’d heard them during the whole…debacle involving _Her_. The first friendly voice, at least. No wonder she was so furious with him; he had criticized _her_ cube friend. He backed off quickly.

“Sorry…ID Core. Keep talking, if you like.”

“Oh—oh, well, wow.” The ID Core seemed taken aback. “S’funny, never really—well, that is, never really gotten an apology before. It’s nice, isn’t it? Anyways, I’ve had some time to come up with a plan, so here’s the plan: we’re going to take _Her_ down. First, we’ll head to the neurotoxin production center—”

It was so strange, there was something _so_ familiar about that voice, but he couldn’t quite place it…

Chell leapt over a gap in the catwalk with feline grace. He followed with considerably less prowess, but he made the jump and they went on.

“—then we’ll sabotage Her turrets. For now, though, just keep running. I am absolutely, positively sure it’s this way—oh, no, never mind, it’s not this way.” The core ducked into a side path and just as quickly ducked out again.

After a minute, the thought occurred to him that they were travelling farther and farther away from the safety of the offices. They were out on the open catwalks—the Aperture Equivalent of no man’s land, if said no man’s land was judiciously ruled by a steel queen with a thousand cameras and enough poisonous gas to kill them fifteen times over. He paused for the slightest moment, darting his eyes around the space in search of bloody-red cameras staring them down—

Chell grabbed his arm. It was neither a gentle touch nor a rough grab; simply human contact, as real and solid as it got. He swallowed, nodded to her, and they continued.

“Are you alright? Er, ok—right, well! We’re almost there, I’m absolutely sure about that—” the ID Core spouted off cheerily.

* * *

At least an hour later, they were still walking—walking now, because as tense as both he and Chell were about being caught and crushed outside the relative safety of the offices, they couldn’t run forever. _Well_ , he threw a quick glance at the woman, _she probably could, actually_. But that was besides the point. They had to conserve their energy a thousand unseen threats that could appear at any moment.

Something crimson flashed in the corner of his eye, and he flinched. But it was nothing, as usual. No bloodred beam of light hovered dangerously over his chest, no splashes of blood from a woman who had escaped death by the skin of her teeth stained the walls, and no cameras peered from the crevices of the walls, glowing with hatred like the smoldering embers of a fire. He tried to shake off the nagging worries like a dog shaking the wet from its fur, but lumps of cold fear clung to him like burrs, stubbornly refusing to be moved.

What if…what if they never left? What if these worries and fears—and this worry _about_ this fear—what if they never, _ever_ left him? What if they clung to him like a rumbling storm head, forever threatening that no matter how sane or content he might be, the storm could break at any moment? That the storm could drench him and drown him at the slightest thing—the most mundane thing?

He hadn’t taken his meds in…longer than he could remember. He could hardly remember what grass smelt like—how could he possibly remember a time when no phantom turrets hid around every single corner and cameras both real and fake watched his every move? The problem with being trapped inside your own skull inside a lab such as Aperture was the fact that you weren’t always wrong in thinking something was out to get you.

Sometimes—many times—there was something watching you with a thousand eyes, eager to watch you trip into a spiraling abyss. Or better, watch you gasp your last, drowning in noxious gas and desperate for just a _breath_ of _clean air_ —

He stopped for a minute to catch his breath. He had to focus on getting the air in and out. In and out. In. Out.

_Just breathe. Let it wash away. Just let it—_

“No—” he whispered, strangled, “—I can’t, I—”

“Mental, that one. Honestly, I thought you had the market cornered on brain d—oh, er, that is, well, you seem very sane! That’s all! Just—augh, I just _love_ you sane you are. How _very_ …efficient a thing you’ve got there. In fact, while we’re talking about it, why don’t we—why don’t we get going again? We’ve got lots to do, after all, and we’ve still got to get in the back of the labs—because, get this: She can’t touch us back there! It’s brilliant, I know! So come on!”

“Please just…” he fought to stand, still hunched over and pressing hard with his weight on his knees, “…please just shut up. For a minute, just please…stop talking.” He panted.

Chell moved as if to come closer, but he waved her off.

“It’s—I’m…I’m fine. I just need a minute.” He tried his best to ignore the flicker of pity in her eyes.

_Just breathe._

He sucked in air, let it out with a faint whistle. The weight wasn’t gone—he doubted it would ever truly be gone—but it _was_ lighter. He could go on.

He shouldered his cube friend higher on his back, stood stiffly, and nodded to Chell and the ID Core. They went on, but for how much longer, he couldn’t say.

* * *

“Right! So, neurotoxin production chamber! Not a bad job navigating, if I do say so myself.”

The ID Core continued to ramble, but he was no longer paying any attention. The chamber was… _huge_. There was almost nothing else to say about it, since that one detail was far more pertinent than anything else you could have had to say. Still, as his eyes roamed around the massive space, he slowly began to trace smaller details of the room.

Panels moved swiftly up and down on linear belts on the walls and ceiling, roaming over the surfaces like insects that had accidentally gotten a thorough spritz of white spray paint. Behind them, mundane grey walls rose in a manner that was at the same time intimidating and yet banal. In the center of the space, a great white thing, ringed with metal bands, rose like a bloated slug above them. Helpfully stamped in fat letters along the long length of the thing, “Neurotoxin Generator” spelled across the white metal surface.

To either side of the mighty generator were several hefty pipes leading away to various vents and valves—at least seven of them—scattered across the walls on each side. From where they stood, relatively safe on a ledge guarded by a thin, spidery guardrail, the entire scene spread before them and loomed above them, making them tiny in comparison. In short, they were flies in the face of a massive flyswatter, staring into the gaping maw of death with the same silent interest that one would stare at a lion in a zoo.

“Right! The office just this way. I’ll just hack the controls and take care of that. You might want to wait outside for this bit—very boring.”

“Oh no.” He quickly took a hold of the ID Core’s lower handle and followed as the core followed its rail, protesting the entire way.

“Do you—do you _have_ to hold my handle, just there? I mean, I’ll be doing the hacking, it’s not really _necessary_ , now is it—”

“I’m. Coming.” He growled, not letting go.

“W-well. Alright then. Off we go.” The ID Core said finally, though it didn’t sound too pleased about it.

The office door opened easily, probably because of the rusted lock that tiredly fell to the floor the minute they entered the room. Normally, he might have been concerned by such a lack of security in Aperture—considering that in light of everything, it usually had a higher budget priority than safety measures—but at the moment, all he was doing was thanking his lucky stars. If he had any. He hadn’t seen any since the brief month he’d spent in the broken-down chamber where he’d found Chell’s portal gun.

There, his face lit only by the light of stars and the ever-shifting moon, he traced the waxing and waning of the moon with a steady regularity. He still could feel the thick paste of gel mixed with soot on his fingers, he could still remember the feel of smearing it in broad strokes, bringing him some small measure of joy against the darkness and loneliness that continually closed in—

He had painted his third mural of her there. Perhaps his first proper one. Any measure of his artistic ability would produce a wild dash of peaks and valleys, ranging from wild scribbles that barely rivaled those of a three-year-old to great murals spanning several panels with splashes of bright color in _just_ the right spots to draw the eye. He didn’t consider himself any great artist, but every once in a while, one of his creations would spark something in his cavernous heart—a dim lantern in a dank cave—and he would feel something that he could only have described _before_ it all.

With an extended metal prong, the ID Core poked and prodded its way into the system with no more care as if it were shuffling through a stack of papers. The systems whirred to life, humming away as if a thousand busy bees had woken up inside them. Buttons flashed in an alarming rhythm all across the many boards, and a klaxon, softened by the wear and tear of the years, sounded softly from the corner of the room. After a few weak chirps, it died, going silent.

“Caution. Neurotoxin concentration down to 50%.”

“Oh no! Oh no! It’s just gotten worse, it’s gone up by 50%!”

“No, no that’s not—" He rubbed his temples, then looked up.

The glimmer of crimson light caught his eye through the glass panels of the office, blurred by dust and smudged with substances that would best be left unidentified. He ducked out of the office to see Chell placing another portal on one of the roaming panels. She waved to him briefly, then turned back to her work.

Amazingly enough, the portal clung to the moving panel, spitting a bright crimson laser from its blue-rimmed mouth down into the misty abyss below. It traveled steadily on across the ceiling, cutting off the three remaining tubes going into the walls. A quick glance showed him that on the opposite wall, the same had already happened, with at least four tubes hanging like limp spaghetti—at least, if said spaghetti had been dipped into a Bunsen burner flame long enough to singe the edges a nice, sooty black.

He laughed, actually laughed. Above them, the announcer’s voice, mild and unamused, noted that the generator had lost all neurotoxin pressure, resulting in dangerously unlethal levels of toxins in the air. He laughed again, and Chell gave him a friendly pat, smiling. They’d done it.

Then the great white slug of thing before them began to compress alarmingly, the metal groaning in protest. His eyes went wide and he snagged Chell’s arm, dragging her into the office and praying that the most certainly _not_ -bulletproof glass would protect them from some of the impact. The main gas chamber twisted beyond the smudged glass, forced into a terrific shape by the pressure—or lack thereof—and suddenly there was a great booming noise.

The glass windows cracked but didn’t shatter. They stood there, hunched in respectively tense poses, for a strained minute. Beyond the office, they heard the grinding, sparking sound of metal scraping against metal as the main gas chamber fell in twisted pieces into the depths.

“Well, er, well done then?” The ID Core offered, and Chell let out a huffing, uneven breath. After a second, it occurred to him that this was as close to a laugh as she could get, and he laughed along with her, chuckling softly.

He stood tall, _feeling_ taller than he had in months—no, _years_. They couldn’t quite lose their wits yet—they still had a lot of work to do—but if life in this hellish underworld had taught him anything, it was that you should take the little victories when they came. No matter how small, how seemingly insignificant, any sort of victory against the culmination of human knowledge and intelligence housed in a metal chassis was something to be celebrated.

“Where to next?” He asked.


	6. Sabotage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! Yay, chapter six is up and the next one is in progress! Hopefully it'll be up some time next week, and no promises, but I'll keep you guys posted. (Writing is hard...)
> 
> I really do hope you enjoy this chapter, and if you do, please consider leaving a comment/review! I really appreciate the love and support you guys have given to this story, and it's encouraged me to keep writing, so thanks! With that, read on!

Given her success in outpacing both him and the ID Core in the neurotoxin sabotage project, he decided to let Chell lead as they took on the turrets. 

The catwalks curled in rigid shapes around the entire system of production, he supposed so that visitors would have the benefit of watching the production of turrets in all its glory. Or perhaps Aperture just liked to show of how little it cared for its guests’ safety, to say nothing of its employees, he thought mildly as a defective turret flew, screaming, over his head.

The turret bounced once on the rim of the incinerator, delaying its fall enough to spit out—

“Wait wait lemme show ya what I got—”

—before falling into the fiery orange glow beyond with another scream.

Curiously enough, the ID Core had gone very quiet. Ordinarily, it’d been quite chatty the whole journey, reveling in the sheer mischief of undermining _Her_ rule. Once they had entered this current area, however, it had gone silent, clamming up in the face of the screaming defective turrets and the eerie voices of the normal ones.

Perhaps, he thought, the ID Core had finally realized that it was not quite so different from the defective turrets. If it put too much of a toe out of line or rather, if it got caught in what they were doing now—which was _very much_ putting toes out of line—it would end up like the defective turrets. Nothing more than a pile of formerly intelligence-suppressing cinders.

They tramped across the catwalks, trooping steadily on to reach the office on the other side of the rather conveyor belt of soft-voiced death. They were steadily traveling beyond their sight, no doubt where they would be packaged away in neat cardboard boxes—pre-packaged death and dismemberment.

The office was nothing to write home about—assuming there was anyone to write home to about it; bland grey walls with muted blue trim in a messy, splotchy line of paint. Several data banks, swathed in dust, lined the sides, and just to their left, there was a locked chamber housing a single, perfect turret. Through the lined glass, he could see a single scanner jerkily lowering and raising, scanning the turret repeatedly as it checked for defective models. Muffled but barely audible through the door, he could just barely catch the voice of the announcer again:

“Template. Response. Template. Response.” And so on down the line.

“Alright, look, see that turret in there?” It was as if someone had turned on a switch, and the ID Core came to life again. “That’s the model it’s using to make all the other turrets—so! If we take that one out, it won’t have a template to work on and it’ll just throw out _all_ the turrets, just to be safe! Now, I’ll have to hack the door so we can _get at it_ , so I’ll need you to turn around.”

He sighed, obediently turning around as Chell nudged him. “That’s not…won’t it just continue from—”

There was the distinct sound of smashing glass, and he whirled around to see that the ID Core had actually headbutted the glass—perhaps core-butted was the more accurate term—and broken the window. For a minute, he actually gaped. He couldn’t quite grasp the level of idiocy that equated “hacking” a door mainframe to simply smashing the glass in like a maniac.

Of course he was one to talk—

“Ha-ha! There you are, door hacked! I—ooh, um, I do hope you’re not allergic to glass, er anything—”

Chell was shaking her head, but she quickly raised the ASHPD and fired off a blue portal through the laughably small opening in the window. She fired another on the wall on the office, and miraculously, it held. In the next second, she had stepped through and retrieved the turret with the same body language of someone handling a dangerous snake. 

His rational mind told him that the turret probably wasn’t armed with any bullets, but every other instinct made him shrink back from the turret in total, abject terror. Chell carefully placed the turret in a corner of the room, partially blocked by and wall, and backed away, holding her breath. With the slightest, gentlest movement, she shoved the turret over and ran for cover.

“Oh! I don’t blame you.” The turret cried, then went quiet. It abruptly exploded, and he and Chell jumped.

They all turned to look back as the small chamber.

“Template missing. Continuing from memory.”

“Aw, what? C’mon, it’s not like you’ve got to—wait, where are you going?” The ID Core’s optic followed Chell as she ran back the way they’d come, giving him a gentle tap on the way. She disappeared around a corner, and he and the ID Core were left to stare at each other.

“So…” The ID Core began, but he gave it an irate look and it quickly shut up. Moments later, he heard the distinctly accented voice of a defective turret.

“—oh man, thanks. You just saved my bacon!” Chell came back in, holding the defective turret in the grasp of her ASHPD’s gravity field like a trophy.

“Oh, what are you— _ohhh_ …” The ID Core rolled back on its management rail, giving her some more space, and Chell quickly portaled her way into the small chamber once again.

“New template acknowledged.”

Clever woman. She stepped through the portals again, greeting them both with a smile, and he smiled back.

“Oh, brilliant work!” The ID Core praised cheerily. “Right, so I’m going to head on over and hack the door open for you. We should be able to see from there if it worked.”

He sighed a little at that, but he and Chell dutifully went over to the other end of the room and waited as the ID Core hummed through the small gap on its management rail. The door stood before them as a mass of unfeeling metal, a circular lock in the center set to an unmoving red LED.

One minute. Two. Nothing.

“Er, hmm,” came from the other side of the door, mildly confused, “ooh! Let me see if—”

The door cycled to a friendlier green, and the entire thing hissed with pneumatics as the lock was released and the two halves slid apart vertically to allow them to pass. They stepped through the gap and continued on, even as—

“—oh, no, that wasn’t it. Maybe I should try, er, well, no…”

He coughed awkwardly, and the ID Core jolted in its spot, somehow mimicking the body language of a startled human perfectly with only a single eye and two handles.

“AUGH—oh G—why didn’t you _tell me_ the door was open? It’s not like I had some kind of hacker alert or something—you could have called through the gap, or _coughed_ , or something.”

He opened his mouth to correct the core, fully prepared to tell it that he had, in fact, coughed to let it know they were there, but he closed his mouth. He wouldn’t waste his energy. The fact that the ID Core had completely neglected to realize that he had coughed in the first place was enough evidence alone to convince him that arguing wouldn’t do anything. At least, it wouldn’t do anything to help the situation.

They pushed through the door regardless, walking at a brisk pace to see their handiwork or lack thereof, as the case might be. Typically, he preferred to expect the worst, so that he was either unaffected or pleasantly surprised by whatever happened. Here and now, however, he felt the inexplicable urge to hope for nothing but the very best—

“It burns!”

“Ahhhhh!”

The soft, childish cries of turrets—regular ones, not defective—echoed though the chamber. They emulated pained cries as they flew from the conveyor belts into the fiery depths, and the flames eagerly licked up higher like ravenous beasts, frothing at the mouth for their next bite of metal.

“Oh—hey-hey! Look at that!” The ID Core laughed, or rather, it was a simulated laugh. “I shouldn’t laugh. They can feel pain, you know…of a sort. It’s all simulation of course, but real enough for them, I suppose.”

He flinched as another turret fell, screaming, into the fire. Chell was smiling, however, and he watched as she unconsciously touched a scar on her arm for the slightest breath. She probably bore many scars from her years of just barely dodging death from turrets and God only knew what else. Scars that were his fault—

_Don’t you start!_ His cube friend piped up again for the first time in hours, perhaps startled into silence by the presence of so many people. If three people—one of them a robot—could be considered a crowd, that is.

_Look what you’ve done. You’ve made her smile._

He paused, glancing at said smile, and though he didn’t mirror it with one of his own, he did nod in response to his cube friend. Perhaps he had done something right, for once. Perhaps he had even fixed his old mistakes.

“I’m different.” A voice called, and he suddenly turned.

A turret called out to him in a fragile voice, its thin red beam flickering weakly. He shied away, instinctively shivering at the sound of that soft voice, however unthreatening it might seem at first glance. He knew the flickering beam was a clear sign that the turret was damaged, or at the very least, devoid of bullets, but you never knew.

It lay helplessly on a nearby conveyor belt, ferried along with broken turrets and snarled piles of metal scrap and wire towards a great glowing rectangle of golden-orange light. An incinerator, if he had to guess. Another minute, and it would be gone into the light, melted into molten steel to be meticulously poured into standard bar molds, cooled, and thrown away in neat piles.

Typical of Aperture to waste millions in reusable scrap metal on the basis of doing science strictly “from scratch”. As if _Newton_ had done science purely from scratch. A long time ago, he would have been furious with such a waste, convinced that Aperture could return to greatness if _only_ —but no longer. He had been a different man then: a scientist at the top of his field with a well-paying job at a top science company.

Now he was a drifter, no better than this turret, simply floating through what remained of his life until the day he was too slow or too stupid and the fire got him.

Like it got everything in the end.

But Chell quickly walked over a picked up the turret with the anti-gravity field of her ASHPD. The field whined softly, and she brought the turret closer to inspect it, being careful to keep the business end of it far away from her.

“The answer lies beneath us.” The turret murmured, as if even _it_ wasn’t much interested in what that answer might be.

“What answer?” He asked.

“Don’t make lemonade.”

A sudden memory struck him, fierce and vivid—of employee handbooks smeared with something altogether too much like blood handed out. He had taken one, of course—they couldn’t hardly _not_ take one—and flipped to a random page to find the adage:

_“Don’t make lemonade. When life gives you lemons, make the lemons into combustible lemons and burn life’s house down. Teach life a lesson for giving you lemons. Then, return to science.”_

_Cave Johnson, CEO of Aperture Science_

His brows twisted downwards. He’d never understood what it meant, or why they had chosen such a quote to represent the founder of Aperture. Regardless, the quote hadn’t meant the slightest thing to him. Except perhaps that the founder might have had a few more screws loose than he had previously thought.

Though he was one to talk.

“Prometheus was punished by the gods for giving the gift of knowledge to man. He was cast into the bowls of the earth and pecked at by birds.” The turret went on dreamily.

He started, recognizing the tale. An old Greek myth, if he wasn’t mistaken. But it could have been Russian, perhaps. The memory was a bit fuzzy. Or perhaps Baba Yaga was Greek.

“Two and two make four. Four is the strongest number.” It went on, as if it considered the conventional flow of conversational topics beneath it.

But the turret itself clearly had a wire or two crossed somewhere in its internal systems. Strangely enough, the story sounded like…almost like a warning. But he knew better; nothing in Aperture ever had a human’s best interest in mind. He doubted such a thought had ever even occurred to any of the laboratories wretched creations.

* * *

Some hours of walking later, on their way to _Her_ chamber, they came across a collapsed tunnel and were forced to detour. Luckily, a sunny path twisted away from them, leading through some collapsed office walls, crept over with vines. Silently—well, apart from the ID Core’s unceasing prattling—they journeyed through, picking their way over piles of dust and crumbled drywall. Old papers, long ago moldered to an unpleasant dark yellow, were scattered stickily over the floor, forever bonded to the tiles by rot and roots and earth. He wasn’t exactly sure how earth had gotten in here, or even how the plants had managed to find anything to grow from but—his eyes caught the flash of white amongst the dirt. Bone white. He quickly looked away.

The ID Core went ahead, rattling along the old management rail at a breakneck pace. Ahead of them, the space was dark and dimly lit away from the broken panels allowing sunlight in from the distant surface. Here, the lights had long ago been extinguished, aside from the pathetic glimmer of the grimy glow-in-the-dark safety tape lining the edges of the corridor. The shine of brighter electric lights caught the shape of dark lettering on the outside of the offices’ glass windows. It was backwards, but he had developed the skill of reading backwards to an absurd extent, spying from inopportune angles for the last few years of his life, and he read clearly: Daycare.

His stomach dropped, and he quickly tried to get his bearings in the corridor. A series of objects, dark and lumpy, rose in the dim light, indistinguishable.

The ID Core’s voice suddenly called out, disappointed:

“Oh no, it’s not this way. This is back the way we’ve come. Neurotoxin’s that way, but—“the core chuckled, a heavily synthesized sound, “—already finished up there, so not really any need to head back, now is there?”

The ID Core quickly rattled back along the rail, chattering and leading them back towards the sunny light of the offices. In the quick flash of its back-lit optic, he caught the sudden sight of a dozen or so trifold cardboard projects, rising from their discarded spots like ghosts lounging on grimy plastic tables.

Chell had frozen. He glanced back, watching her stiff body language as she walked over to a particular project. The ID Core turned around, curious as to why they had ceased to move forward.

“What are you—oh. Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. That did _not_ end well.” The ID Core came closer. “Awful business that.”

He nodded his assent. A terrible day indeed, nearly blotted out from his memory because remembering it was pain _itself_ —

“Forty potato batteries. I mean, I understand they’re children, but still, not exactly primary research, even within the child sciences.” The core said this as if there were some universal standard of science that children everywhere must be held to at all costs. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Aperture had created one, but all the same.

Chell twitched, drawing closer to the exhibit. Her face was blank as ever, but he was beginning to detect those microscopic expressions of hers, those little flashes of emotion that could not be completely smothered. And in her icy-blue eyes, he caught the slightest flash of something that might have been considered fear.

Afraid of a children’s display? By something clumsily put together by the hands of some Susan or Jane or—oh. _Oh._

In the bottom right-hand corner of the display, just barely visible despite the combination of dim lighting and a healthy coating of grime, were two words. Seven letters—“By Chell”—written in a child’s unfocused hand. No wonder she—but that was impossible. She was an adult when she’d been recommended for testing—twenty-one years old, to be exact. He knew because he’d put the information in himself—

A headache sprung to the forefront of his mind, making itself all too known, but he ruthlessly shoved it away. Skittering around to the back of the display, he found the truth written in much more mature, dour script: Ciel Marino, daughter of Dr. Marino, Department of Biochemistry. He returned to the front of the display, his eyes catching another detail; a scrawled note proudly mentioned a “special material from dad’s work” in the lopsided list of materials. Perhaps that would explain why the potato battery in question was a far cry from a shriveled mass of starch like the others. Instead of sitting dustily on its display, this potato had stubbornly taken root in the sparse dirt and managed to grow right up into the ceiling.

He paused for the slightest second, memory washing over him. Hot, soft, buttered mashed potatoes, like his mother used to make… He quickly found a couple of smaller offshoots from the larger plant and stuffed the tubers in his pockets. They were a bit dirty, but a bit of rubbing on his lab coat would probably have them nice and spiffy in no time. He froze for a second. _What kind of an idiot are you?_ These potatoes might be the first sign of freshly or somewhat-freshly grown food he had seen in years, but that didn’t mean that they were safe. Who knew what little Ciel had pilfered from her father’s lab? It might have been miracle grow or praying mantis DNA for all he knew. He would have to save the potatoes as a last resort.

Chell snapped out of her daze to watch him. She quickly glanced at his bulging pockets and copied him, stuffing at least three or four potatoes into the pockets of her jumpsuit. A tinge of envy struck him at her much larger pockets, but he didn’t comment. In any case, it was more potatoes for all, so he couldn’t exactly afford to be upset.

Her feet turned back towards the sunny, ruined offices, but her gaze lingered on the display. She knew they had to keep going, but—but she couldn’t drag herself away.

“It wasn’t yours.” He offered, and those piercing eyes suddenly turned on him. He quailed for a moment, and her gaze softened, almost in apology. Perhaps she had no idea just how scary her gaze could be—after all, she’d only ever used it on a malicious AI. But her eyes were gentle now—though not quite _soft_ —and they regarded him with a calm, cool sort of stare.

“Y-you were a volunteer test subject. You were twenty-one. You—”

“Oi! You two coming? We’ve got a big nasty core to take care of here.” The ID Core cut in.

He glanced at Chell, but there was a resignation in her eyes. She backed away and strode back into the sunlight, away from the shade of memory and the darkness of past. He fell into step alongside her, and she waved him away as he opened his mouth. Time for explanations would come later. After.


	7. Fear Itself

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well hello all. I know this is up later than I would have liked, but here it is. Also! This chapter is extra long, so are we even for postponing? :) Anyways, this chapter took two beta read-throughs before it was ready to post, because I really wanted to get these next few scenes right. Those of you who know the game by heart know what's coming next, so I'll stop yapping and let you read. If you do enjoy, please consider leaving a review/comment. They are greatly appreciated!

They weren’t out of the woods yet. After some walking along the catwalks in the darkness at the fringes of the labs, where _She_ could see but never touch, they came to some offices. Well, an area she couldn’t touch _except_ for turning the lights out on them. But in any case, the ID Core’s backlit optic had a brighter setting, originally intended to aid scientists in low lighting conditions when maintenance was required.

In a moment of self-discovery, the ID Core had switched the flashlight on and promptly screamed bloody murder in surprise. After a few shaky breaths—odd, since it was a robot that didn’t need to breathe or even have the capacity to do so—the ID Core had laughed uneasily and they had gone on.

These offices were more neglected than most, with mold creeping up the sterile white walls like zombie fingers. _Actually, scratch that, don’t think about that don’t think about that—_ he tried to push the thought out of his mind. To his dismay, a delve into some more ancient offices had put him in contact with records of the experiments of the 50s in Aperture’s deepest, darkest chambers. One of which had involved something close enough to a real-life zombie to make him shiver at the thought. Perhaps _chambers_ was the best term for those ancient lab rooms; it brought to mind ancient Egyptian tombs, which was accurate enough. There was enough death to fill a war in Aperture.

But they were so close to seeing the sun. They quickly made their way into the next office, where the ID Core had already gone into one of the smaller rooms and broken a transportation tube—

“AUGH!” The ID Core yelled at some point, but it didn’t much matter to him since he was a little preoccupied tumbling through space—

After a chaotic moment, he could see again, could breathe again, and he found himself facing Chell as they floated along inside the tight vacuum transportation tubes. He struggled to breathe, feeling the walls closing in tighter and tighter—

Chell grabbed his arm and gave him a squeeze. Her expression never changed, but he got the sense that she was doing her best to bolster him up, even as they both tumbled unnervingly through space.

“Ah!” The ID Core, whom he had forgotten was even travelling with them, cried out, and he managed to snag a handle. The core trembled, as much as it _could_ tremble, its handles shaking. “Ah, right. Thanks for that.”

Suddenly the core laughed. “I cannot believe—ack—they _told_ me that these were no fun—s’they said, ‘it’s not fun at all’. Can’t believe it! Whale of a time!”

At least one of them was enjoying the experience.

Sooner, rather than later, they came up on a junction that spit them out on another platform, a few feet away from a catwalk. He jumped free, holding tight to the ID Core, as Chell ducked. A plain white cube followed them out, bouncing off the platform and over the edge. Unable to contain his curiosity, he glanced over the edge and caught the fleeting sight of the cube fading into the misty darkness where he could no longer follow it.

“Oh—oh. Lucky us, yeah?” The ID Core stared down after the cube. “I suppose you wouldn’t bounce nearly as much—you’d probably be fine—but I’d bounce, er roll, I suppose. Nice, very nice _grip_ , you’ve got there.”

He looked down, meeting the ID Core’s stratospheric blue gaze, glowing hopefully. Something about the color felt familiar. Perhaps it reminded him of the repulsion gel’s bright color. Made for an excellent hue with which to imagine the sky, to imagine…something else. He couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Sure.” He mustered. To his left, Chell had spotted something in the distance, staring with keenly focused eyes. She hefted her ASHPD and fired once, a single, spiraling blue shot that split the murky darkness.

A distant but satisfactory _phish_ sounded clearly. She turned to him, shrugged a little, then turned rigid. Those eyes, icy cold and efficient, fairly glowed in the darkness. She was looking for a twin panel, and she found one on a wall just few feet from them, a messy splotch of white in the dim light.

It was awfully convenient that just when they weren’t quite sure where to go, two panels should happen to appear so neatly like this. Every alarm bell in his head was ringing wildly, and he unconsciously began backing away. Chell shot him a quick look, and he flinched. This didn’t feel right, but he had nothing beyond suspicion to convince her that they _shouldn’t go_ —

Chell stepped through the portal with no hesitation. He supposed that even if she suspected it was a trap—which was likely, considering how sharp she was—there was little other option for them. The catwalk a few feet away from them led to a neat and tidy dead-end that dropped into the mist, and now that he was really, _truly_ looking, there was nowhere else to go.

Reluctantly, he followed her, the ID Core tightly in his hands and his cube friend on his back. For once, he felt evenly weighted on either side, and he heard something pop in his back as he stood a little straighter. He winced. That couldn’t be healthy, but all things considered, if he escaped with only a sore back as a souvenir, he would be happy to have it.

He’d forgotten that Chell had the advantage of her long-fall boots, which would cancel any downward momentum from her falling through a vertical portal and out through one placed on a ceiling. He, on the other hand, did not possess any such advantage, and he fell hard onto the unforgiving charcoal grey tiles.

“OH! Oh G—held! Still being held! S’fine, it’s fine, we’re fine it’s _fine_ —” The ID Core nattered on anxiously, panting between words.

For a second, the breath was knocked out of him, and he lay gasping for air that refused to enter his lungs. The next minute, he was up on his feet, hauled up by a strong arm and finding himself on a small platform swathed in dark grey. Adjusting his cube friend, who thanked him quietly, and the ID Core, who did not say thank you, he quickly scanned the place with darting eyes. Trying to get his bearings, he followed Chell’s gaze and his attention was ambushed by a bright, almost obnoxious yellow sign, pinned to a nondescript door:

**GLaDOS Emergency Shutdown and Cake Dispensary**

It was a trap, obviously. The word _lie_ flashed behind his eyes like a lunatic traffic light, strobing at him anxiously as if he didn’t already know that his was obviously _a trap_ , a trap that they couldn’t hope to escape but perhaps they could—

Chell reached for the handle, and he jolted, reaching out to stop her. She turned to look at him, slightly irritated. Her expression seemed to indicate that she was aware of the trap, had made her peace with it, and was already ten steps ahead and escaping when he had so rudely interrupted. He opened his mouth, fully prepared to speak, then stopped.

Perhaps it was best to let her lead again. After all, when it came to directly tangling with _Her_ , she actually a pretty good track record.

He held out a hand and gestured to the door.

“We’re following you.”

“Well, not much of a choice really, I go wherever _this one_ takes me at the moment, but—”

Chell nodded and tried the door handle.

“—oh, well okay then. I suppose this is where we need to go…”

The ID Core quickly trailed off as the door and sign fell to the floor, clearly fake. A closer glance showed that it wasn’t anything sturdier than plywood—so flimsy that it had splintered a little when it fell.

His stomach dropped, and a cold fist curled around it, twisting hard. He swallowed anxiously, trying to tell himself that they were prepared this time, that Chell was leading the way, that she was experienced with taking _Her_ down—

The platform they were standing on jerked into motion, sliding upwards smoothly after the initial jolt. He trembled, and though his rational mind did its best to remind him of the facts, of the advantages they held, it was a feeble attempt. Holding back his worries with a couple of aces in the hole was as useless as a mouse trying to hold back the sea, especially when the paranoia got a fistful of it.

He shrunk back to the floor, trying to making himself as small as possible, trembling violently. Somewhere, he let go of the ID Core, and it rolled with no small measure of irritable complaining over to Chell’s booted foot, where it halted abruptly. This too, was cause for complaint, but he couldn’t have cared less.

It was as if the shadowy monster inside his head had gleefully poured gasoline onto the smolder of worry in his head. Now, it was a raging fire, licking at the sides of him, desperate to _consume_ him. It was hot, so very hot but at the same time cold and deep and drowning him but it didn’t matter after all because he couldn’t swim and—

Chell grabbed his arm, bullying him upright. In the moment, the shadowy creature in his brain snapped at her, furious that she should interrupt. But in the next, he was desperately, horribly glad she had done so.

They rose into place, finding themselves in a great glass cage below the great dome of panels that was the ceiling of the central AI chamber. Above them, She hung languidly, like a queen twirling a knife, lounging on Her throne. To all appearances, She was calm, collected, and poised. He knew the opposite was true; Her surface-level calm concealed a bitter sense of anger, as poisonous as it was patient. She was a predator, waiting for the right moment to strike.

_“Well, you found me. Here to murder me again?”_ She tisked, tilting her optic to the side mildly, though he could feel the waves of hatred from where he stood. _“Well then. I hope you brought something stronger than a portal gun this time,_ for your sake _.”_

He stood, shaking, but he stood, Chell just beside him with the ID Core and ASHPD in tow. He quickly took the core, and the motion caught Her attention. Her optic changed targets, the ghostly-white shape wavering slightly through the glass walls of the cage they were currently in.

_“Oh. How very…_ considerate _of you. You’ve lured a very troublesome rat out into the open for me. I believe the human way to deal with one of those is to simply…_ snap its little neck _. Very neat. Very clean. Perhaps one of the only worthwhile things that humans have come up with, although that’s not saying much. Still, credit where credit’s due.”_

If he wasn’t so busy shaking and trying to get his own limbs back under control, he might have snorted. GLaDOS could have an organ-transplant and she would still refuse to start handing out credit to anyone other than Her own egotistical self. If she were human, that is.

Although…that gave him an idea. He glanced at the ID Core, who was shaking as well, even as it tried to talk its way out of the situation.

“Right…right, so, you can’t kill us, in case you haven’t noticed—ah!” The ID Core gasped as She placed fresh turret boxes all around their glass cage; the glass was clearly not bulletproof, and if for any reason She had caught on to their scheme and repaired their sabotage, they would be a pile of bloody ribbons in a matter of seconds. He swallowed nervously at that, and on the spot, he quickly prayed that his mother’s Catholicism might give him some sort of credit with any great deities there be who might be taking notice of him.

The turrets were unveiled, their boxes rising with the heavy expectations that usually weight down great show-curtains, and one by one—

“Aw, crap.”

—they promptly exploded. He laughed aloud, unable to contain the sudden, giddy relief he felt. He quickly slapped a free hand over his mouth.

_Probably shouldn’t have done that._ His cube friend whispered anxiously, a little late.

_“Oh, I see. You were busy back there. Well then.”_ She lowered her heavy-lidded optic to their level, staring them down. _“Let me guess: you, that little idiot, and a rat all went nosing around in the neurotoxin generators too.”_

A long, synthesized sigh, followed by the announcer—a one Greg Peterson—blandly noting that the neurotoxin generators were indeed offline.

_“Well, I suppose we could just glare at one another until one of us drops dead.”_

They did indeed stare for a second, though to be honest, Chell and GLaDOS were the only ones glaring or approximating a glare. The ID Core was rolling its optic nervously, and his own eyes wandered through the room, swallowing every detail up in a vain attempt to pretend _She_ wasn’t there. Besides, you never knew when something small could save your life.

Then poor Greg, swallowed up by so many others in this place with nothing left but his emotionless voice, cut in mildly:

**“Core corruption at seventy-five percent.”**

A chance flung itself at their faces, and he nearly fumbled it.

“ID Core?”

“Yeah? About time you starting talking to me, well, that is, other than _yelling_ , that’s certainly a nice change…but hey, what was it you wanted again?”

**“Alternate core detected. Core transfer recommended. Please place the alternate core in the receptacle to begin a core transfer.”**

It was risky, sure, but what wasn’t risky down here? Now he almost sounded like Richard “Rick” Suthers, who had boasted strenuous hiking and biking trips every weekend and once claimed to have bested a rattlesnake with his bare hands. His wife had clarified this at a company event, adding the miniscule detail that “Rick” had cracked the snake over the head with the edge of a shovel, decapitating it. So while he had indeed saved their campsite, the whole _bare-hands_ thing was a bit of a stretch.

Regardless, he felt just as confident, smashing the glass of their cage with the blunt edges of his cube friend. He ran helter-skelter with the ID Core towards the receptacle that had risen seamlessly from the floor.

_“I hope you aren’t planning to do something stupid. Because in case you haven’t noticed, you’re already doing something stupid. But there’s still time to stop.”_

He didn’t stop to answer, though he desperately wanted to say something sufficiently blithe and flippant. This confidence running through him was like a drug, heaving him high above reality to a place where he didn’t really care. It frightened him, and for the slightest moment, he hesitated.

A panel came crashing down inches from his head—perhaps the only means of mechanized death left to Her—and he quickly forgot his hesitation. However dangerous this might be, however much he doubted that the ID Core could actually run the facility should it replace Her in the chassis, in the end, it was the lesser of two evils. At least, it was like choosing to get attacked by a housecat or a mountain lion; there would be pain either way, but in one scenario, you would at least survive.

He thrust the core into the port with some unnecessary force, but he felt it was at least somewhat warranted in the situation, all things considered.

**“Core transfer initiated. Replacement core, are you ready to initiate a transfer?”**

“ _YES!_ ” The ID Core was practically screaming, its curiously accented voice sparking something in his mind, something familiar—

**“Corrupted core, are you ready to initiate a transfer?”**

_“No. No no no no no no no no.”_ For the first time, She sounded…frightened. Down here, as long as She was in the chassis, hooked up to the source—the lifeblood, even—of the labs, She was reigning queen of a kingdom of metal and wires. But if She was ever to disconnect, or to _be_ disconnected—

**“Stalemate detected. A stalemate resolution associate is required to press the stalemate resolution button in the stalemate resolution annex.”**

A section of paneling just to his right lifted in a wave of charcoal black, revealing a smaller chamber with a single, tantalizing button. It glowing hauntingly in the dim reflected lighting of the central chamber, seeming to taunt him with how _easy_ it looked. But surely She would have set traps in the chamber—She was nothing if not a calculating, intelligent opponent.

But Chell was already running, sprinting with the fanaticism of a madwoman to reach the button before She lowered the panels or set off some trap. A panel crashed to the floor, shortly where Chell had been, but the woman didn’t even flinch.

_“What are you doing? You’re not qualified to press that, you’re not a stalemate associate. You’re not even a full-time employee._ Don’t _press it.”_

He could have sworn the ghost of a smirk crossed her face as she skidded to a stop. Then she smashed her hand down on the button so hard he heard a faint, plasticky crack.

**“Stalemate resolved. Core transfer initiated.”**

_“What have you_ done? _”_ There was a horribly prophetic sense of foreboding to Her tone of voice, but he blocked it out. She was beaten. They had won. They had _won_.

“Oh—oh erm, well, I guess I didn’t really think about this, but, um, I just had a thought and, well, what if this hurts? Like what if it really, _really_ hurts?”

_“Oh it will._ Believe me _, it will.”_ If he didn’t know any better, he would have thought that She was speaking from experience.

“You’re just saying that right? You’re just, oh…oh no. Oh no, you’re serious, aren’t you—just, just so we’re clear, how much does it hurt exactly—AUGH!” The ID Core screamed horribly, yelling in obvious pain.

He took a wobbly step back, horrified. He’d forgotten that pain simulation had been a part of more recent cores’ schematics; supposedly it had been for the purpose of encouraging self-preservation so that the engineers didn’t have to fiddle with a core’s innards every ten seconds because it heedlessly crashed into a wall. Never mind that this defeated the purpose of cores in the first place: taking on jobs too dangerous or painful or just plain wearisome for human hands. Not to mention the ethical implications, though those were rarely mentioned in the company manual and protocols.

The ID Core’s screams faded suddenly, and he suddenly became aware of _Hers_. GLaDOS was screaming, making modulated sounds that should never have come from a machine. If metal could be tortured, if circuits could be beaten, if a computer could be ripped apart, they would be making the sounds that _She_ was making now, agonized and soaked with a pain-fueled rage.

She drooped, jerking and twitching as tiny mechanical arms and tools unfolded like spiders’ legs to pick at and dismantle Her faceplate. A bloody glow lit the snowy white of Her optic, and the little mechanical arms continued their work despite Her tortured protests.

 _“NOOOOOO!”_ She howled, Her voice flanging and warping into something that he had never heard in his life. Something he hoped he would never hear again. 

Then She was fully dragged within the glowing red depths of the maintenance panel and Her hateful, gleaming white faceplate disappeared from sight. Mere seconds later, he heard the triumphant whoops of the ID Core, rising from the floor to revolve in its shiny new body. It cried out happily, its outer shell expanding in excitement, revealing a plethora of mechanics and wires within. In a flash, the ID Core was juggling a couple of cubes with some bouncing panels on the floor.

“Oh ho! Look at me partner! You’re tiny! That’s not just me, is it? I mean, this body is-it’s-it’s _massive!_ Oh and—” The ID Core abruptly switched to Spanish. He’d taken some Spanish in high school, years and years ago, but it was far too fast for him to follow and he was much too out of practice.

“I have no idea what I just said!” The ID Core laughed, chuckled from the sheer joy of intelligence, of limitless possibility. “But I can find out!”

Chell was smiling, openly, as she walked back to face the ID Core in the main chamber. Her face was nearly glowing, but it was just a touch restrained. They weren’t out yet. But the battle was over. They had won. She motioned to him and he quickly joined her.

Chell motioned for the ID Core to do something, but the ID Core tilted its optic in confusion.

“Oh what, what are you—do you want me to do something? What is it you—ohhhhhh, do you want me to call the escape lift? Right, right, right, of course, right…that.”

He nodded reaffirming the Core’s statement, and shortly after there was a cheery ding. The hiss of pneumatics filled the room as glass elevator slid down a slender tube to open at their level on the floor. He couldn’t believe it; after so long, they were finally leaving. They were finally going above the earth, to the surface, with the sun and the grass and the rich, cool earth that wasn’t haunted by death—

“Right! Lift called, so, go ahead and get in, and I’ll just…right, I’ll just send you on up!”

For once, he didn’t hesitate and stepped into the elevator with Chell right behind him. That was his first mistake.

He should have been very, very afraid.

“Oh-oh no.” They rose, then stopped as the ID Core suddenly interjected, “Oh, but, how am I going to come with you?”

Chell’s face fell into that hardened, puzzle-solving, AI-murdering look. But for once, it did not have a specific target, and it held no malice, no bitterness. It was all business, scanning the room, calculating routes and plans and possibilities.

But there was nothing to be done. He could have told her as much if he didn’t see that she was already coming to that conclusion herself; if they dared unplug the ID Core, the system would simply look for the nearest replacement, which, happened to be _Her_ core.

Regardless of the fact that She had just been unceremoniously ejected from the mainframe, the systems would easily welcome her back rather than leave the governing system without an overseeing entity. Because heaven forbid that a human should have to take control of the facility’s primary functions.

“Oh! I know, I can just send the lift up, then jump in at the last second and join you! You’ve really got to catch me that time, though, because I’ll be smashing through the glass and—oh, oh. Oh, yeah, didn’t think about all the broken glass, not very enjoyable experience is it? Broken glass? You could really split yourself open with that stuff! No, no, maybe I’ll just…well.” The ID Core sounded at a loss for ideas.

But then the ID Core’s tone changed.

“Actually, why do we have to leave right now?”

He swallowed, feeling a lump of cold fear find a resting spot at the pit of his stomach. What was the ID Core doing? It couldn’t possibly be affected by the mainframe, unless—

“I mean just think about it, really! Do you have any idea how _good_ this feels? To finally be in control? To-to-to be the-the, well, the big cheese? I mean, _look at this!_ Look at all of this!”

The ID Core quickly began juggling a few more cubes. They flew around wildly, landing on the floor after only a few tosses. The ID Core lifted the elevator higher, so that they could meet its gaze at the great height of the massive chassis.

“ _Look at this!_ Tiny little Wheatley did this!”

_Wheatley, Wheatley…oh no._ Everything clicked into place, stunning him with the force of a sucker punch. Suddenly, he knew why the ID Core’s voice had sounded familiar, why its very mannerisms felt like something out of a distant memory.

It was Stephen Smythe behind that glowing blue optic.

Once upon a time, he’d known Stephen as a co-worker and a friend. A close friend, a _sane_ friend, who didn’t mind listening to him and giving him a strong rapport to cling to when things got rough. The closest thing to a brother that he’d ever known, having never truly known one.

Yet another soul swallowed up by the ever-devouring beast that was Aperture Laboratories.

“Wheatley?” He asked weakly, but the core either didn’t hear or paid him no attention. That blue optic glimmered, thin shafts of light peeking out along the edges of the jagged crack down the center.

“I mean, look at _this_!” The ID Core—Wheatley—drew back from them, creating some space. Another horribly cheery ding sounded from below them, and a multi-service claw snaked up from the floor into their field of view. Wheatley bore something small and lumpy and brown aloft like a grand trophy. He carelessly tossed the item up and caught it with a surgical precision, as a tinny voice cried out:

_“AHHH! What did you_ do _to me?”_

It was _Her_ voice. He almost didn’t recognize it at first, devoid of Her characteristic cruel sarcasm. In fact, without the cruel undertones of Her modulated voice, it almost sounded like an entirely different person. A frightened, powerless person.

He shrunk back against the walls of the elevator. Maybe he could get control of the elevator controls from the inside—but-but, no, a quick glance at the paneling told him that there was nothing to be done. Nothing, _nothing—_

“Look at this! This,” Wheatley announced grandly, “is a potato. It’s a toy, for _children_ , and now She lives in it!” There was a sinister glee to his words, something he had never heard from the core prior to this moment.

Like a fool, he had hoped that the mainframe would be separate from Her poisonous touch; he’d hoped that Her anger was a ball and chain attached solely to Her to her metaphorical ankle.

_“I know you.”_ There was a dangerous edge to Her voice. It was more careful than he had ever heard it, more calculating than he’d ever thought it could be. It was far less like a cat lazily batting a mouse—fully in control—and much more like a mongoose going up against a cobra twice its size. A fight that could be won, if you didn’t make a single mistake.

She wasn’t the kind that made mistakes lightly.

_“The scientists couldn’t control me, so they put…voices inside my head.”_ She sounded pained. _“There was one absolutely_ inane _voice, wouldn’t stop spouting off horrible ideas, all the time.”_

Wheatley was slowly catching on, and the Core didn’t like what he was hearing.

“No—ah, no no, nope! Not listening. I’m not listening.”

_“It was_ your _voice.”_

Wheatley exploded. “I _don’t_ have terrible ideas, and I am _not_ a moron!”

_“Oh yes you are! You’re the moron they plugged into my head to make me an idiot!”_

He pressed back against the walls of the elevator, petrified. From what he knew of Stephen, he was a brilliant man, far from an idiot. But if he had any great weakness, it was pride.

And She had just punctured his ego like a bloated balloon. The pop was deafening.

“ _I AM NOT A MORON!_ Huh? Can a moron do _this_?”

There was a horrible crash, and glass showered over them, shoving him back and out of the elevator. He reached out, but glass bit into his hands. He let out a grunt and fell. The ground rose up to meet him, about as friendly with its greeting as a brick to the face.

He savagely shoved his hair out of his eyes and looked up, ignoring the blood on his hands; Chell was hunched over in the elevator, glass scattered over her shoulders, as She screamed from the floor where She had landed.

“Why don’t you tell me, you lunatic of a woman? Can a _moron_ punch you into! THIS! _PIT!_ ” The multiservice claw swung viciously through the elevator, showering more glass down upon Chell and Her, who screamed again with alarm.

He watched with a transfixed sort of horror as the elevator lurched, its supports being smashed one by one. Now it hung by a single, tenuous cable, groaning in alarm. Chell rose, slowly, unsteadily, her eyes never leaving the ID Core’s shattered blue optic.

He could just barely make out her voice, fragile and low and little used.

“P-please.” She flung the word out like a lifeline.

“Y-you talk?” Wheatley stopped for the slightest second. The core’s optic squinted, then suddenly went wide as he seemed to take in the elevator. “What—oh, oh no. Oh what have I—”

There was a terrible snap, and the elevator fell into the depths without so much as a cross bar to slow it down.


	8. If a Tree Falls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all and welcome to chapter eight! Hope you enjoy, and if you do, please do consider leaving a comment/review. They are greatly appreciated. With that, read on!

It was dark. Not the dark of her relaxation vault room, dim and eerie. But not quite the dark of the testing chambers before She’d lit them—that split second of void, filled only with the faint hum of electronics.

This darkness was _old_. It was rough and abandoned, broken up occasionally by the splitting light of ancient lamps down the long, _long_ shaft. For a second, she caught the sight of some spray-painted numbers in bright, construction-site-yellow—“2000 meters”—then the darkness whipped it away. She had shoved the stomach-churning feeling of free-falling down some minutes ago, learning to trust her long-fall boots; they had caught her before, and much as she didn’t like to trust anything from this place, her boots were more worthy of trust than anything else.

Unlike Wheatley. A bright spot in the darkness, lighting her face with sparks of happiness and the realization that there was more to her existence than the bare minimum of testing and raw, primal survival. For a few foolish hours, she’d even dared to hope that friendship—that dusty, nebulous thing she had long forgotten—was indeed still alive and warm and _there_. She shoved the thought away.

She should have known better, and despite her instincts, she’d been desperate enough to ignore them. But now Wheatley didn’t matter. She decided right then and there that she would not—could not—regret. Regret would only waste time, waste her energy with useless expression of emotion that wouldn’t get her out of this pit.

Although…if she were to regret anything at all, it would be the wretched man above. His tag had said Dr. Rattman, and if she were in better circumstances, she might have had a good internal chuckle at the irony of such a name. Considering said circumstances, however, that name only sparked pity and grief. As much as she had suffered, this man had shared her grief; she could only imagine what it was to be hunted by Her when you were burdened with the knowledge that Her very creation was your doing. And yet he hadn’t escaped; he had stayed for who knew how long down here, creeping in the darkness and scribbling on the walls—all for the purpose of trying to help one lucky subject to the sunlight above.

For that, she regretted that they were separated, but if she did end up dying from this fall—if her boots failed in her hour of most dire need—she wouldn’t wish it upon him. For all he’d done, for all the fear and strain he had endured trying to make things right, she forgave him. And he deserved to see the sunlight as much as she did.

If she ever got out of this pit, that is. Speaking of—

_Clap, clap, clap._

_“Oh good, my slow clap processor made it into this thing. So at least we have that.”_

Even falling several hundred feet per second—into a mining shaft that might _actually_ go on forever, considering Aperture’s track record—She still managed to find the time and presence of mind to make snippy remarks. Still, it wasn’t all that surprising; she’d made the mistake of mustering a single word to Wheatley before they’d fallen, proving that she could talk. She couldn’t actually—she’d surprised even herself with that single “please”—but considering how hard She’d tried to get a reaction out of her, there was no chance She would let up now. It was too late, and now that She knew she could talk, she had a strong feeling that the AI would double down Her efforts to antagonize her.

For the next few minutes, at least.

_“Hey listen, just in case this pit isn’t actually bottomless, do you think you could stuff me into one of your long-fall boots? Just be careful to land on one foot.”_

The slightest tremor in Her voice gave Her away. As sarcastic as She pretended to be, She apparently knew no more than she did about the logistics of this mine shaft. Which did not fill her with a great deal of confidence.

_“Oh G—”_

Something came rushing up to meet them in a haze of splintering wood and she felt her world go black.

* * *

They’d fallen. He stood, gaping, even as the jagged hole was quickly covered up by half a dozen panels sliding into place. As if it had never happened.

“Aurgh! No! That’s not what I wanted to—" Wheatley seemed frantic. “Oh, oh G—what have I—how could this have happened?”

He scuttled away from the his spot, frightened by the sudden noise. But there was nowhere to go.

“Hey wait—you! Come back, come back!” The core didn’t seem to realize that it was yelling now, amplified by hundreds of hidden speakers, and he flinched at the loud noise. At the voice he now knew was far too familiar—

_“C’mon Doug, we’re really just wasting our time here.”_

_“At a company ordered meeting?”_

_“I mean, yeah, you_ could _call it that, but, just as another option, you know—keeping our options open—we could more_ efficiently _use our time to expand our ‘cultural horizons’.”_

_“You want to ditch the company meeting to go see a play or something?”_

_“What a brilliant idea, Doug! I couldn’t have put it better myself—and, I just happen to know that there’s a theatre ‘bout twenty minutes from here. If we hurry, we can catch the last night of the Nutcracker.”_

_“…you planned this, didn’t you?”_

_“What’s wrong with making a plan b?”_

He was gasping, trying to wrangle the pieces of himself back into a semblance of order. But they were too scattered by the whirlwind of events battering him to bits. She’d fallen, but had she? Was she alive? Were either of them? Did Chell save _Her_ , would she dare? Did he care? Did it _matter_?

“Say, erm, are you alright…down there? Because if you aren’t, if you need to take a minute, you could er, well, um, I suppose you could sit on that cube of yours. Let’s see, you dropped a minute ago, but, well, here.”

His awareness was blurry, but he could see enough to note a white-edged thing with battered and scorched pink hearts. Like a madman, he grasped for it. Like a madman, he clutched it close, desperate to hear its soothing voice. And like a madman, he lost himself to his own spiraling thoughts, unable to pay attention to the drama above him.

He’d done this. He’d killed her again, sentenced her death whether short and merciful or long and painful he didn’t _know_ —all that mattered was it was his fault, _his fault_ , and there was nothing he could possibly do to atone for his mistakes this time. No, this time, this time he was a broken shell of a man past all hope. He had lost his final chance, his _only_ chance.

“Please, p-please,” he begged, crying out for relief from this crushing, horrible weight of guilt and shame. They pressed in on his head, his chest, blackening his vision and leading him into the misty grey void of indifference. He lay limp on the floor, his hands falling from the cube onto the tiles with a dull thud. Above him, the ID Core was haloed in a sharp, bright corona of light. That blue optic stared down on him, and he wondered blearily if the sky-blue eye knew the secret of life. Probably not. It wasn’t alive, after all, just a flimsy sort of carboard cutout sham—

“Are you…listen are you alright? I mean, I know you’re obviously laying on the ground, there. Just lying there, like you need a nap. Ooh, do you need a nap? That lady never really needed nap—strangest thing—although…she _was_ asleep for simply _ages_ and I’d imagine that would give you quite a bit of sleep…fuel. What do you humans call it, exactly? Your sleep…fuel…tank, I suppose? Is that what you need? You need to fill your sleep fuel tank? Because I can set something up with—ow! What was…what was that?”

He listed his head to the side, no longer looking at the core, only half listening to Wheatley’s rambling sentences. The core was happy to steamroll on regardless.

“Ow, what is this _awful_ feeling. Did she—did she leave behind some sort of, I dunno...core _fungal infection_ or something? It’s almost like this-this-this, this I don’t know…this sort of, well…”

He lifted his head an inch off the ground, trying to summon some sort of strength, some sort of panicked emotion to will his limbs to rise and face the core. But he just couldn’t seem to make himself care. The finely tuned alarm bells in his subconscious were ringing wildly, jittering off the hook and clattering to the floor in unadulterated panic, but his overriding consciousness was like a heavy blanket, muffling the sound. He had nothing left to give.

“…like some sort of _itch_.”

The phrase should have sent him into a frenzy of paranoid activity. He should have been looking around wildly for the nearest air vent to crawl away into some safe den, some safe haven. He did not. He lay, instead, on the cold floor, mindlessly letting the chilled breeze soak into his bones, deadening them.

“You know what—you know I think I know something that would make you feel better. And, wouldn’t you know, it would be helping us both out, sort of a kill two birds with one stone sort of situation, course we wouldn’t have birds involved, nasty things they are.”

He dreamed he was descending to hell as the panel beneath him sunk into the floor, taking him away from the light he had lost.

* * *

She awoke to the unpleasant sensation of feathers fluttering down into her face. She barely caught the sight of a crow flapping wildly, weighted down by something lumpy and brown and—

_“Oh G—_ do _something! Grab me, grab me—!”_ Her voice quickly faded as the bird carried Her off into the space above Chell’s head. She didn’t twitch. In her mind, there was only one thing to be said of Her sudden trip and that was _good riddance_. She didn’t need Her—never had, actually—and if anything, she probably had a better chance of getting out without Her nagging voice wearing down her patience every step of the way.

She quickly rose, then regretted it for a brief moment when the ache of the fall coursed through her body, utterly unignorable. After a minute of breathing, standing hunched over nearly motionless, the pain subsided and she dusted herself off a little. Glancing around with keen eyes, she caught the sight of her portal gun—easily recognizable with its pearly white sheen against the soggy, muddy muck she seemed to have landed in—and she scooped the device up in a single fluid motion.

She checked the device for damage; a few scratches marred the pure white surface, but otherwise, it seemed fairly functional. Her eyes caught on a white surface that looked like it might hold a portal, and without a breath between the thought and the action, she fired a single portal—blue—at the white surface. Miraculously, the portal held, a flat blue disc that glowed against the wall. Good to see that the gun was still functional and moreover that there were some surfaces outside the typical testing chamber panels that would hold the dimensional portals. Still, a single portal wouldn’t do her much good unless there was a twin surface hiding around here, preferably at some elevation to give her a decent view of the massive space.

She got moving, walking with brisk steps even as she picked her way around the puddles of murky water that littered the muddy, dirty path she traveled. All around her, fires burned, freshly lit—perhaps from her fall. She didn’t know if the elevator’s broken electronics might have ignited some flammable substances in the area, but if she had to hazard a guess, that would be it.

Bracing herself with her free hand, she passed through a massive half cylinder shape that curled up and over her head like a frozen wave of concrete. Perhaps part of an old pipe? She darted her eyes around but saw no reason to be concerned; the piping—if that truly was the structure’s intended purpose—stretched only for a short distance before ending. She passed through at least two others before she began to see the signs.

Mired in the mud and the debris of now unidentifiable trash, wooden signs stood stubbornly telling anyone who came across them to “Go Away!” and “Do Not Enter!”. Several others noted cheerily that this was a restricted area, and one even went so far as to say that the area was quarantined, though for what, it didn’t say. She paused for only a second at this sign before moving on; surely any illness that Aperture could have cooked up would be long dead by now with no human hosts to prey upon.

And she knew well enough that there was no one left alive down here to fuel a disease.

The first real problem she encountered was the chain link fence. It was clearly old, with patches of rust in some places and chunks of grime filling the holes in others. But the signs warning about electric shocks from the fence were still clearly legible—otherwise, she might have considered climbing the fence. Considering Aperture, an electric fence was the least of her problems, but she would not be bested by something so mundane just because she refused to believe it could be on after years of disuse. Besides, just beyond the fence, she caught sight of another white surface and shot without hesitation. An orange portal caught on the surface and held, but she didn’t allow herself a smile just yet. Later, she told herself, though she wasn’t even sure what later would look like. To be honest, she’d known ever since the elevator incident that she was _living_ through a later she hadn’t expected to see since she heard that final cord snap and felt her stomach in her throat.

Backtracking to the portal she’d placed earlier, she gained no small satisfaction at the amount of ground she’d covered just by walking through the blue and orange portals. Orange light flickering in her periphery, she quickly took in the space beyond the chain link fence; more signs and debris littered the space, but in the distance a massive concrete platform rose from the floor before a massive sealed door, flanked on either side by offices. Electronic light shone faintly from either one through grimy windows, and her eyes were quickly met with the sight of two separate buttons.

Her unconscious mind moving faster than the forefront of her consciousness, she fired two portals—one up on the platform, the other on a pale grey wall a few feet away—and quickly stepped through. Once above on the platform, she entered the left office and fired a portal on the wall, just behind the button and strode to the other office. She would need to move fast—even with the portals’ help—to pull both levers at once and trick the system into thinking that two people had pulled the levers. Then…then she wasn’t sure exactly. But if she didn’t press the buttons, she couldn’t move forward; perhaps that was a stupid mentality, but she didn’t exactly have anything else in mind to do.

She pushed the second button. For a second, nothing happened. She could have smacked herself—she wasn’t in a test chamber anymore, this was far, _far_ outside of Her convoluted little set of rules. She gotten too used to the semblance of security in in the elements of Her test chambers; no matter how complex, convoluted, or unconventional they got, the elements remained the same in their properties.

But this place was old—perhaps even older than Her, if that was even possible. It played by a new set of rules, unfamiliar to her for the moment. And that made it dangerous.

A klaxon suddenly blared, and flashing lights lit the space with harsh, blinking red lights as the door began to unlock with a great clanking and hissing ado. With a harsh groan of metal, the door swung open at an agonizing pace to finally reveal…a door. A small, nondescript, plain, _boring_ office door with a metal crossbar that winked placidly at her in the flashing red lights, mocking her as she approached.

She shook her head, pushed on the crossbar and travelled on.

* * *

“Welcome Olympians, War Heroes, and Astronauts, to Aperture Science! Now I’m sure you’re wondering…” She jumped.

A quick scan of the room revealed several speakers clinging to the walls in plain view, practically vibrating with the loud, brash voice.

“—I’m Cave Johnson, CEO of Aperture Science.”

Ah. That would answer one question at least. She hadn’t the slightest idea who the man was, but she disliked him on instinct. Something about his voice seemed to suggest that he was fully on board with even the most radical and fringe inventions. The fuzz of the audio seemed to suggest that the recording was old—far older than any of Her little comments or even the banal voice of the male announcer she’d encountered while She was still inactive. If she was lucky, this Cave Johnson was long gone and wouldn’t provide yet another threat.

A few portals later, she was soaring through the air, right through the aperture in the Aperture Science logo that hung dustily from the ceiling. As she passed through, she heard a whoosh and a clanging thump and turned her head to see that the “p” had fallen to the ground. A cloud of dust was already beginning to settle around the massive metal letter, but she didn’t stay to watch. She kept moving through the surrounding offices.

Though most of them were old and decrepit, with faded posters hanging limply on the walls encouraging cooperation with robotic colleagues, a few were in slightly better condition. Walking into one of the larger ones, she was reminded less of an office space and more of a hotel lobby, with lush furniture and marble floors. Unlike the other offices, this area felt hushed with the gentle touch of time; a check-in desk sat mutely in the corner under a layer of undisturbed dust, with an elegant awards case just to the right of it. Moving to the case, she scanned the contents. Half a dozen awards littered the shelves in a cluttered arrangement, broken up occasionally by the presence of a few framed newspaper clippings. All of them glowed with praise for the company known as Aperture Science, thought she couldn’t imagine why, considering her experience. “Best New Science Company” and “Notable Contributions to Potato Science” (that alone was cause for some irony all things considered) were just a few of the comprised awards. Yet something else caught her eye, making her pause; all of the dates for the awards were firmly anchored to a central time period: the 1950s.

It meant nothing to her now, since she wasn’t entirely certain of the current date, but considering the state of decay and abandoned feel of the area, all she could gather was that the year 1950 must have been some time ago. Perhaps the company had been more than what it was now, before…well, before everyone had disappeared. She still didn’t quite know the specifics of that event, but it wasn’t pertinent at the moment; GLaDOS could have easily killed them, from what she knew of the AI’s resources and control over the facility, but given the absurdity and lack of safety measures in Aperture, the scientists could have just as easily killed themselves in the name of scientific discovery. Probably both.

To the right of the awards case, a long crimson path of what looked to be an imitation of red carpet, painted poorly on the marble tile floor, led to a plain door. It opened easily with the slightest pressure, and she travelled through to find herself within a massive, sprawling space. The ceiling was lost to her sight, stretching high above her head, and far below her, a great lake of shimmering greenish substance flickered threateningly with reflected fluorescent lights. Massive concrete towers scattered around the great green lake punctured the surface of the water, rising like baleful ghosts as they stared down upon her, wrapped around with broken and rusting metal staircases.

In the distance, she could see something else in the dim glow of the sparsely populated lights—something vaguely poly-sided and spherical, if she had to describe it. But she would have to get closer, preferably get to a position of some elevation to get a proper look and more importantly, get a grasp on where exactly she was.

Portaling to the top of one of the concrete towers, she found herself looking at a fantastic sight. Poly-sided spheres hung from the distant ceiling, stamped with stenciled black letters and numbers. The numbers were mundane and meant nothing to her, but word stamped on each of the spheres caught her eye: “chamber”. Like a test chamber? An old set of test chambers, buried deep beneath the rest of the facility? It could mean that Aperture had been testing ever since the company’s inception, whenever that had been. The thought chilled her; she could easily grapple with a deranged AI’s incessant need to brutally test any human being left alive in the facility—GLaDOS was distilled spite and petty rage incarnate—but the same behavior from humans was a disturbing thought. _She_ had called her a monster shortly after their… _reunion_ , but if this was the kind of behavior humanity was capable of, she wasn’t so sure that the AI had been wrong.

She shook off the nagging thoughts. She didn’t have time for this—she didn’t’ have time for regret and guilt. Everything she’d ever done up until this point was purely for her survival, and, she might add, for the survival of others around her. But now She was surely dead or at least facing the ignominy of being pecked to death by a hungry crow. That thought alone gave her some grim satisfaction that glowed in the soft little corner of her heart not hardened by pragmatism.

Spotting another splash of white in the distance, she fired again and quickly found herself on another platform, this time facing a material emancipation grid flanked by plywood boards, of all things. Unlike the grids she was familiar with—glowing with a dangerous, eerie sort of light—this grid had the distinct feel of being slapped together at the last minute. She hesitated for the slightest moment, then stepped through, feeling a tremor of panic as her gun vibrated and her previously placed portals were evaporated. But she jerked her chin up, eyed the puzzle before her with a dangerous sort of look, and began.

The puzzle was not difficult by any means, and to the best of her knowledge, it felt like an introductory exercise. Almost as if—

“Well done war hero, astronaut, and/or Olympian! Thanks to your efforts, the future of science is now one step closer to today! Now, I can’t actually see your progress, so if you are failing all of these tests, please ignore any and all praise I may hand out. Cause you don’t deserve it.”

She waited for a second, expecting more from the strange, disembodied voice of one Cave Johnson, but nothing else came. With a long, slow sigh, she went on to the next test, glad at least someone sounded like they were enjoying themselves.

* * *

After two more chambers, the catwalks ended abruptly in a twist of broken metal. Glancing down, she could see the distant reflections of the water below; no going that route. But there were a few pale-colored surfaces scattered within her range of sight, and she found herself portaling to a higher level in seconds. From her higher vantage point, she quickly calculated a path from the platform to a nearby office with windows nearly black with grime and dirt.

Taking a deep breath, she ran, leapt, and fell in a hurtling free-fall towards a thin, square panel. At the last minute, she fired, flinging herself through space. She skidded to an awkward stop on the office platform, hearing something pop in her knee, and she winced. Rising, she quickly made her way to the next office, but she stopped.

Beyond the grimy windows, beyond the dim lighting, something fuzzy lay on an old desk. Drawing nearer, she could see that the fuzzy object was a nest—a massive swathing mess of wires and shredded pieces of paper—and in the center—

_“Oh thank God.”_

It was _Her_.


	9. [REDACTED] Has Joined the Chat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! Welcome back to the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center...anyways, just wanted to say thank you so, so much for all the love! It's been amazing how you guys have commented and followed this story and gives me all the warm fuzzies. Big thank you to my beta reader PastSelf-you absolutely ROCK.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this chapter, and if you do, please do consider leaving a comment/review. They are greatly appreciated. With that, read on!

For a very, very long moment, she simply stood there, staring at _Her_. The once deity-like AI stared back, although it was hard to say if She stared or was simply incapable of moving Her optic and thus forced to meet her gaze, unflinching.

The silence was broken by Her sudden cry of pain.

_“Ow! Hey! Quit you horrible little bird and just—ah! Listen,”_ She suddenly addressed her. _“you’re good at murder. Could you—ow!—_ murder _this bird for me?”_

Chell hesitated. On one hand, there was the _very_ appealing option of watching Her be pecked to death by a bird, all while housed in possibly the humblest of root vegetables. On the other hand, her instincts—ever sharp and dead accurate—were nagged at her with the possibility that she would need _Her_ in the coming hours. And much as she might foolishly ignore them, her instincts were never, _ever_ wrong. After all, she’d had her doubts about Wheatley, and look how that had turned out. Her mistake had been ignoring her first impression and nagging doubts, and look at where that had gotten her.

Even so…she turned away and began to walk. If she knew the AI well enough, she knew that GLaDOS would only offer something to Chell’s own benefit if She was desperate enough. Perhaps with enough distance and time to consider She would—

_“Wait!_ Wait! _Don’t—ow!—don’t go!”_

Chell didn’t allow herself a smile, not yet, but she settled for a slightly more smug tilt of her head as she slowly, deliberately turned and looked at the potato core.

_“Look, just take of this bird for me and we’ll call it even!”_

Chell cocked one eyebrow, as if to say, _really? That’s all you’ve got?_ A sudden rumble, rolling through the floor and ceiling of the office, as well as the entire underbelly area, interrupted her thoughts.

_“Did you feel that?”_ She asked. Chell rolled her eyes; of course she’d felt it, but that wasn’t the reason She’d asked. The AI was making a point, as She tended to do in situations where She had significantly greater amounts of both time and resources to indulge in.

_“That little idiot doesn’t know what he’s doing, and if we don’t get back up there and put me back in my body, he’ll bring the whole place down on us. Or worse.”_

She stiffened at the mention of the little core, but she did not allow the flinched feeling to show on her face. Rage, regret, and sadness whipped through the forefront of her mind in less time than it took to blink, as she just as quickly packed them away. Folding them into a drawer to stay closed until a later date, she turned her attention fully on the potato core.

Moving before her thinking consciousness had time to catch up, she strode over to the nest to shoo away the crow, who squawked indignantly before fluttering off in a flurry of black feathers and miffed feelings. As the AI sighed a synthesized breath of relief, her mind caught up, and she realized the enormity of what she’d done. Like or not, there was no going back now. Unless of course she decided to simply leave Her sitting there, waiting until the end when the bird would return and finish the job—

No. Chell quickly stabbed the potato core with the tip of one of the prongs on her portal gun, earning her a sharp cry of protest, followed by an unsteady warble as the AI adjusted to an apparent power surge.

_“W-w-whoa. Do you happen to have a multimeter on you? Never mind, I think the conductive material of the prongs just gave me an extra half volt. Hang on, I’m going to try to do some scheming, here I go—”_

She instinctively leaned back, guarding her face with her free hand as an electric buzz like radio static filled the air. She glanced at the potato core. The little yellow light, so seemingly harmless in the face of her memories of a far larger, far more threatening optic, had gone dark. For a split second, she felt something akin to panic run through her stomach. If She was dead—as dead as a robot could be down here—then what was she going to do about the whole Whe—the whole ID Core problem? What would she do if he—it—really did end up ending all of them?

Though She had never talked about the running of the facility to her outside of callous sort of comments concerned with recycled air, logic dictated that all of Aperture had to be powered by some massive source of energy. Depending on what it was and how the ID Core was currently handling the situation, they might all be plunged into darkness at any moment or vaporized before they had time to register what was happening. Of course, she wasn’t an expert, which meant that her guesses were less like guesses and more like shots in the dark.

Speaking of—if she didn’t want to be shooting portals wildly in the dark, she’d best get moving. She was uncertain of the ID Core’s control down here, but if she’d learned anything it all, it was that you didn’t assume anything down here. Don’t take anything for granted at any one moment—visibility, logic, oxygen—any of them could be willfully taken away at any moment. Or they could simply disappear.

Not a comforting thought, she mused, catapulting herself onto another catwalk. Not at all.

* * *

“Easy enough test, yeah? I came up with it myself, y’know—just as a starter of course, got lots more complex and _dangerous_ ones up ahead. Really diving into the depths of my vast intellect, you know? But for now, just pick up that portal gun and just erm…well, I dunno, just start using it I suppose.”

His gaze shifted slowly to the ASHPD, then slowly back to the massive, bright blue optic staring hopefully at him from the massive monitor on the wall just opposite him. Blue…blue sky—he could have sworn he saw a bird fly out of that blue, but…but no. No, he was just imagining things again.

He shuffled forward, clinging to the strap on his shoulder, and slowly…slowly, he picked up the gun, uncomfortable with the weight in his hands. Imagine, the power to travel instantaneously between points several miles apart, all encased within a device no bigger or heavier than a small picnic basket. An image flashed into his mind at that, filling the chamber with a thin layer of earth from which sprouted emerald green grass. It filled the space with a living, pulsing glow, and atop the grass just beyond, he saw a classic picnic blanket spread soft and square. A woman, indistinct from distance or perhaps his eyes had gotten worse, waved to him, beckoning, and a child holding a ball was suddenly next to her, jumping up and down from excitement.

He couldn’t disappoint them, now could he? The sky-blue voice disappeared, and he eagerly leapt forward on trembling legs. He had to get to the other side of the chamber to say hello, finally see the woman and child’s faces in great detail, perhaps so that he could capture them properly in a mural—

He awkwardly shot one portal, then another and stepped through. The blanket and the woman and child were so, _so_ close, and he looked up to see their faces—

They were blank. Their faces were blank, but they waved again and burst into a fine mist—so fine he couldn’t feel it as it settled along his arms and head—but he could see it and it _had_ to be real—

He knelt, feeling the cavernous spaces of his heart growing huge and inescapable, like a black hole resting within his chest. It shredded his insides, and he groaned with the pain as he put his head in his hands and wept. It was his fault, _his_ fault and he deserved this for imagining happiness that would never be his, _could_ never be his, because of what he’d done. This guilt was eating him up from the inside, and he let it. It was what he deserved—

_No._

He lifted his head, something warm rolling down his cheeks.

_No._ His cube friend repeated, despite how violently he shook his head. _You don’t deserve this. The man you were before might have, but_ not you _. You have to get up and keep going._

“What’s the point?” He whispered, wary of the sky-blue voice.

_She’s alive. You know something as simple as a fall wouldn’t have killed her._

“But…but it very well could have. She’s tenacious, not superhuman.”

_You know that isn’t true. She was wearing her long-fall boots, and she’s probably trying to get back up to us as we speak._

“That’s—yes…that could be. Maybe, but—”

_But nothing! Get up!_

He rose, startled by the cube’s tone.

_Listen, Doug. You’re the only one who can help her now. Her_ and _him._

He glanced at the monitor, at the sky-blue voice.

“Even…even him? He’s beyond helping.”

_Not yet. But it’s up to you now._

He nodded, barely. Then the full meaning of the sentence hit him.

“What does that mean?”

_You…you already know what’s about to happen._

His stomach sunk into the cold depths.

“Y-you can’t—I won’t let you go.”

_You have to._

He glanced to his right, where the picnic had disappeared. To his left, the faint blue glow of the emancipation grid beckoned, a thin flickering wall of certain death. He couldn’t even consider it.

“I’m _not_ leaving you behind.” He sucked in an uneven breath, choking back a sob. He tore the cube from its makeshift carrier and clutched it close, hugging it to his chest as he knelt on the floor.

“What? Oh—wait what are you doing now? You’ve nearly finished the test!”

“Please, p-please…don’t leave me. I can’t do this alone.”

_But you’re not alone. You will never be alone down here, Doug. But you have to let me go._

“I-I—I can’t, I—”

“Helloo-oo, I’m waiting. _This itch is getting worse by the second_ —”

_Let me go._

_Let._

_Me._

_Go._

It was impossible. It was absurd. It was a hundred thousand horrible things that he couldn’t bear, wouldn’t bear—and yet. And yet, he would bear them. He could bear them. It was possible, if only because the alternative was _impossible_. He couldn’t risk a living human being’s life for a…a _metal cube_. The words stung his mind with their callousness, but he knew at their very core, they were true.

It was hardly a choice at all.

“I—I will.”

_Good, Doug. And…and goodbye._

“Goodbye…friend.”

He moved to stand, taking the cube in hand. Pressing a simple red button, another cube—one with dull, lifeless grey accents—plopped unceremoniously onto the button.

“Ahhhhhhh…” The sky-blue voice made a sound of distinct, pure relief, as if he were sliding into a nice hot tub after a long day. “Oh, well done.”

He approached the field, the cube lighting the surface with its presence, and he swallowed.

_Oh, one more thing, Doug. Two more things, to be precise._

“Yes—yes.” He grasped at the cube—his cube friend’s—words. Anything to prolong this moment, to delay the inevitable.

_My name was Sarah. And I forgive you._

  1. _Forgive. You._ Three simple words that settled like a warm but heavy weight over his shoulders. They carried quite a weight, those words. Quite the burden of expectation. Something to live up to.



As for the other ones, well…there were a hundred thousand thoughts racing through his mind, all of them sickened by the implication of what his cube friend,or rather what _Sarah_ , had said.

He didn’t know if he could bear it. He didn’t know if this was just the beginning of the end for him or if the end had begun a long, _long_ time ago without his notice. He didn’t know _anything_ and it terrified him in a way that put everything in Aperture—even _Her_ —to shame.

But he had run from fear long enough. Even if this was a fool’s errand, even if this was the beginning of the end of his life, _even if_ he was to die trying—this was something worth doing. He could _feel_ in his bones that it was.

“Thank you, Sarah. Goodbye.”

_Goodbye, Doug. Thank—_

The cube fizzled in the field with no more fanfare than if a leaf had been thrown into a fire. Merely one of thousands, whose short burn left no memory and no mark in the passing of time. One of a thousand poor, wayward souls finally en route to heaven, if indeed there was one. He wasn’t entirely certain on that point.

He hoped for Sarah’s sake, there was one. If what he thought she meant was true, then, well…he hoped she was at peace. She deserved it. He still had to earn it.

Smearing away his tears with paint-smudged hands, he took in a long, heaving breath. Then, he lifted the ASHPD with heavy hands and heart, and he went on.

* * *

_She_ began talking again after around the tenth test.

_“Oh—ah! Wait, how long was I out?”_

If she’d been inclined to attempt talking, she might have said “not nearly long enough”. Though she’d done her best to shove the feeling down, the simple pleasure of solving puzzles without Her nagging voice was just that, pleasure. Without Her chipping away at Chell’s limited patience, all that was left was the clean feeling of finishing a puzzle and the comforting trust in her own wits and skill.

Since She had effectively returned, however, that feeling fled as quickly as a summer breeze. Now, everything was back to the same old routine: solve a test, then enjoy a shoddy reward in the form of sarcastic commentary about every little mistake. Did she get burned by a laser? Careless. Did she get shot at by a turret? Slow. Did she fail to make a certain jump because she had miscalculated the momentum required? Fat.

The whole body-shaming comedy bit seemed to be Her personal favorite, though why Chell couldn’t fathom. With the revelation of being a ballet dancer in a life long ago came the sudden realization that she had been strong—even stronger than she was now. She’d assumed that it was a perfectly normal measure of human strength to be able to leap thirty feet onto a moving platform or heft a massive portal gun while doing it. However, if her recent acquaintance was any indication, this was clearly not the case.

The man—Ratmann—had been visibly taller than her, yet she’d been able to wrangle his lanky frame and drag him out of the vent earlier. He, on the other hand, had difficulty with the smallest of gaps and when she’d tried to sprint ahead with the ID Core earlier, Ratmann had only slowed, panting at the rapid pace. Of course, a quick glance at his gaunt, hollow face was enough to tell her why he was unable to keep up.

To put it simply, she wasn’t fat; quite the opposite. But the simple fact that Chell had put so much thought into the subject was proof that She had gotten to her. Chell ground her teeth at that and shoved the thoughts away.

Exiting the test, she quickly cast her eyes around the small space. A clear path wound forward, encouraging her to proceed directly to the next test, but something about the set-up made her pause. From the exit of the test, the path underneath her feet diverged briefly, with one path leading to a nearby elevator shaft, while the other led to a dead end. Her gaze snagged on a single white panel, laid against the wall where the brief path came to an end. Suspicious enough, but if it had a twin—

Her eyes suddenly landed on the sight of another white surface peeking through the plywood panels up above her, and she fired off a portal with little hesitation.

_“Wait, where are you going? We need to keep going, preferably until we find an elevator that will take us back up to that idiot,_ also preferably _before we all get blown up.”_

Chell ignored Her, stepping through the portal. She found herself on yet another catwalk, and before her, just to the left, the warm glow of an old office beckoned. Approaching, she found the office to be in slightly better condition than the previous ones. A desk bounded the wall just to the left of the door, scattered with papers and folders. All of them seemed to be in surprisingly good condition, considering that every other scrap of paper she’d seen thus far had been yellowed with age and shredded to pieces more often than not.

Beyond the desk, the office opened before her, warm but sparse. The cheap wooden walls rose with an undeserved importance, bearing up several posters advertising incentive for testing. A man jumping wildly as if sixty dollars was the best thing that had ever happened in his entire life, while a boat hung in the background, seemingly unrelated. She supposed it could be some sort of luxury item, further emphasizing the sense of reward. She turned away.

Right next to the poster, however, was something slightly more remarkable. A portrait, featuring two well-rendered figures. The first was a man sitting in a high-backed chair, and she quickly recognized his face: Cave Johnson, CEO of Aperture Science. But beside him, her arms delicately resting over the back of the chair with clear closeness to the man, was a woman she didn’t recognize, a woman who—

_“Wait.”_ The potato core suddenly said, and for once, Chell did not object. _“Those people, in the portrait, they look so_ familiar _—ow!”_

A new voice suddenly joined the conversation.

_“Whoops, sorry, dear. I’m afraid it might hurt, but there’s no getting around it.”_

Chell stilled, gazing with hard eyes at the potato core.

_“Who_ are _you?”_ The potato core asked of herself.

_“Why my name is Caroline, darling. And though a potato is not ideal, I’m glad to be back.”_


	10. Radio Chatter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all. Sorry it's been a while, but please always know that I update the story summary regularly with what phase each chapter's in. Once it hits the editing stage, the chapter will usually be up with in a day or less, so if you're curious, please feel free to check. Hope you enjoy this chapter and if you do, please consider leaving a review/comment. You guys' comments really do give me the warm fuzzies and motivate me to keep writing. Thanks again to my beta-reader PastSelf. With that, read on!

For the second time that day, Chell stared for a solid minute. The potato optic didn’t twitch. A long intake of breath, heavily synthesized, broke the silence.

_“Right…well. I suppose I should introduce myself, since we haven’t really been, at least, not formally.”_ The potato core’s voice bordered on civil, possibly even cordial.

Chell nearly flinched in anticipation of some cruel remark, certain that this was some twisted sort of joke that only _She_ would find funny. Given Her previous attempts at humor (the whole “phone company” incident came to mind), Chell didn’t doubt in the slightest that a convoluted personality switch was entirely possible.

But no such remark came.

_“My name is Caroline. And I was…I was a—"_

_“None of this is relevant at the moment.”_ _Her_ voice came back in an icy gust. Her tone was clearly clipped and impatient and if Chell didn’t know any better, She almost sounded…fearful. As if She were trying to hide something.

Chell wasn’t certain, and in any case, She was, unfortunately, correct. They needed to keep moving, and they couldn’t waste any more precious time arguing about trivial things. However, if things ever calmed down, she would have to grill this “Caroline” about who and what she was. Her voice had some sort of familiar quality to it…something that she’d heard before. With time, the memory would jog loose and whatever it was about this “Caroline” that was so familiar would click into place like a cube in rattling into a floor slot. A perfect fit that would make perfect sense. Ideally.

_“Look. Let’s just focus on getting back up there so that idiot doesn’t kill us both before we even get up to the upper levels.”_

Conveniently, she neglected to make any mention of Caroline as an acting party in this scenario. Chell shook her head but refused to display anything further. She exited the office with no more ado than she’d previously entered it and quickly portaled her way back to the catwalk where she’d been. With a slight touch of hesitation, she approached the incandescent field, and her portal gun illuminated the patch closest to it with a pale glow.

_“Now, as long as_ she _doesn’t come back, we’ll be fine. Probably. I’d run the numbers, but I don’t exactly have enough juice to do much. Unless the emancipation grid possibly…no, never mind. Just, pretend I never said anything.”_

All things considered, it was the easiest thing She had ever cajoled, threatened, or forced her to do. In fact, it was so reasonable a request considering their relationship, Chell instinctively didn’t trust it. The AI was hiding something, and though She was correct that they needed to keep moving, Chell couldn’t let the question go.

It went against her very nature to prioritize a lesser mystery ahead of the most urgent goal of _staying alive_ —at the very least, it went against the very protocol that she had lived and breathed by for who knew how long—but something stopped her. She couldn’t have named the thing that stopped her even if she’d been questioned, but it was this mysterious thing tied to a strong gut instinct that forced her to slow down, take a breath, and try to get a better grasp on the situation.

But that wasn’t to say she couldn’t multitask. Striding briskly through the emancipation grid, she surveyed the next chamber with all the outward emotion of a potted fern, though the inside of her mind was whirling with a thousand trains of thought. At first glance, the test seemed easy, but upon closer inspection, its true nature revealed itself. At least half a dozen different elements were at play, including one of the unfamiliar gels she had recently been introduced to. She knew her mind would eventually adjust to the new element, working it into her mental calculations and strategies. But for now—

_“OH! Oh my. That was quite the jolt. Not that I blame you dear, can’t really stop for anything at the moment, from what I understand.”_

The kinder voice returned, just as efficient as the AI and yet somehow tempered with a gentle tone and soft inflection. Chell was reminded, inexplicably, of a mother. Not her mother, seeing as she didn’t have access to enough specific memories of her own mother to make a comparison to the voice now speaking, but the voice felt like it belonged to the kind of person you might go to with a scuffed up knee to have it blown with kisses while you were showered with coos of affection and sympathy. A specific sort of scenario, she had to admit, but she hadn’t the slightest idea where the memory or even the imaginary scene had come from. It just felt…right. Familiar.

_“Oh dear, let me see…yes I remember those emancipation grids. I believe they put out about a volt or two, if I’m remembering that correctly. And if a volt was what brought me back in the first place, perhaps that grid was what allowed me to come back just now. Of course, this is all conjecture. She wasn’t lying earlier when she said that there wasn’t much to work with in the way of calculations.”_

Chell took this speech the way she took most things—that is to say, she stared dead-eyed at the potato core, trying to follow the latest in a long line of strange events while keeping her face neutral. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be much of a problem, considering that her exhaustion, barely kept at bay by the adrenal vapor She pumped in at all times, often forced her expression into one of blank staring. Leaping over pits of toxic waste took every scrap of energy and every last wit bouncing around her skull, so the deadpan look that Rattmann—poor man!—seemed to think was an act had in fact become habitual. It was simple: when her small store of energy had trickled through her brain and into her pumping, straining limbs, there was nothing left.

Sometimes, she couldn’t even muster a hateful glare for the ruby-eyed cameras. That—more than the insults or the failures or the mistakes—was rock bottom. That was the moment when she knew that if she didn’t stop, she would make a slip-up that left more than a painful scar.

_“…but, oh dear. Look at me rambling when you’re trying to focus. You finish first, dear, then perhaps we can chat.”_

Chell nearly choked. _Dear?_ The AI had previously shown some miniscule sense of awareness that Chell had a limited amount of concentration, but naturally, it was only in connection with the fact that Chell was now responsible for keeping the both of them alive and thus any form of distraction could prove doubly fatal. This was distinctly different. Whether it was all an act or not, she couldn’t tell, but if it was a tactic to gain her trust, it was working too well. Something in her brain had latched affectionately onto the kinder, softer voice and refused to let go, no matter the amount of pragmatic reasoning she threw at it.

To be fair, though, if it was all an act, it was a very convincing performance.

The test was hardly impossible. It was one of a numbered few she had come across that had been so constructed that she spent a good minute grasping at a solution just out of reach. Sometimes, her subconscious was simply faster at figuring out the puzzle than the forefront of her consciousness was and she would pace, the solution tickling her brain teasingly even as it dangled just out of reach. Sooner or later she would snatch it from the air and her limbs would jolt into motion, following a plan finally crystalized in her mind.

By the end of the test, she was breathing hard, having had to waddle in an awkward sort of squat for most of it in order to keep herself from bouncing wildly all over the room. Though she had a feeling that somewhere, somehow, the bouncy blue gel probably had a perfect use, for the moment she silently cursed the existence of the slick azure substance. Thanks to _it_ and her own stupidity, she now was the owner of at least five new bruises, all mostly centered on her unfortunate backside. Three of those five had directly resulted from a misstep that sent her careening into the air and ricocheting wildly around the test chamber.

Still, she managed to get through, but she hesitated for a moment on the edge of platform, the emancipation grid just to her back. After a second, she sat on the edge, swinging her legs gently and bring the potato core around to face her fully. Or…as much as the potato core could face her, considering the limited range of the tiny optic. If that was a functioning optic at all. She had to assume it was, given that the tiny core had recognized the portrait earlier.

_“Oh, are you finished?”_ The kinder voice—Caroline—asked.

Chell hesitated, then nodded slowly.

_“Excellent. I didn’t want to disturb you while you were busy—you looked quite deep in thought—but I’m afraid we should talk.”_

Chell settled into her spot, but something remained tense and coiled up deep in her middle, just waiting for the excuse to bolt into motion.

_“Given the situation, I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to talk to you before_ she _comes back, and there are quite a few things you should know.”_

* * *

He stumbled on the last step, heading down to the elevator, and found himself sprawled unceremoniously across the hard metal floor. The ASHPD went skidding out of his hands as his knees stung with the impact.

“Oh come on, are you-are you, oh come on…just get up, you know. Just…just get up and…and keep going! Because guess what—I mean you’ll never guess, but guess what: you’re almost to the next chamber! And all you gotta do is just…just step into that elevator there! Don’t even have to do anything, just step in and I’ll do the rest, just get you up there to where you need to…go. Not that hard, is it? To get in the elevator?”

The sky-blue voice went on mindlessly, cajoling and wheedling that if only he would just _get in the elevator_ then all his hopes and dreams would come true and everything would be _just fine_ …

He dragged himself to a sitting position on the floor. Just pulling his torso upright felt like being dragged against a washboard by an angry giant. Everything hurt in some way or another by this point; his arm throbbed angrily where a thermal discouragement beam had grazed him, his leg stung where he’d bruised it against the ledge of a platform after he’d hurtled through the air and barely caught the edge, and countless smaller bruises and scrapes cried for his attention as he sat on the metal floor, breathing hard. To top it all off, something was brewing at the back of his skull, threatening to break into a full-blown headache at any minute. If he had to guess, it was probably the adrenal vapor being pumped in at every vent and crack in the entire blasted system; though Chell had obviously been well-adjusted to the aerosolized equivalent of adrenaline drip, for his part, he’d been sheltered from the gas to some extent.

Another thing to worry about. Despite everything that had happened, he had retained the barest shred of normalcy in the form of a semi-regular sleep and rest schedule roughly every four hours. Though he was fairly certain that any medical expert would have torn their hair out at such egregious sleep patterns and probably fainted at his stringent diet of decades-old cans of beans and water, it had kept him alive at least. Now, he had nothing resembling his old standards of physical support and without the mental respite of sitting down to a can of beans long ago dissolved into paste, there was no break from the constant strain. He hadn’t even had water in the last few chambers—he could only measure time by chambers now, without sleep or mealtimes to slice the time into chunks.

He lifted his head slowly, struggling to his feet. He had to keep going—even if Chell was dead (perish the thought, and him with it), _Sarah_ was right. The sky-blue voice belonged to a creature that had been like himself once and for that, perhaps, he had to risk some pity and do his best to rescue the core from its own destruction.

He walked gingerly over to the ASHPD and knelt to pick it up. Something reared up from the shadows, blinking with irate eyes both crimson and gold, and hissed horribly, making him flinch. In a flash, it was gone as if it had never been. Shaking, he picked up the ASHPD and gripped it tight, abusing the tough plastic polymer casing with anxious fingers.

Despite what Sarah had said, he knew he only had so much time. Only so much time before he slipped and some unforgiving test element gobbled him whole like a flame to paper. He’d never prayed in his life, not since he’d been a tyke memorizing catechisms, but he prayed now, _hard_.

_Please let her be alive. Please._

He didn’t know what he’d do if she wasn’t, but he knew it was far too late to try to escape on his own.

The only way they’d be leaving was together.

* * *

Caroline took a long, synthesized breath.

_“When I was a girl, I always loved science. More than that, I was_ good _at it. My father indulged me, being an astrophysicist himself, and he lent me all sorts of textbooks as soon as I was able to read them. But…as I grew older, they realized that I would always be interested, that it would never really, well, go away. I think they hoped it was a phase, since of course, one doesn’t just get theoretical physics degree. Or rather, one doesn’t do that as a girl, anyways._

_“They let me go, they let me choose what to study, but they warned me that I was choosing a hard path to walk. I didn’t believe them then, I thought maybe…well, it was a changing world, and Black Mesa and Aperture were in their infancies. There were a hundred new opportunities and I was fresh out of college with excellent grades and a perfect record, and, of course, my long-worked-for theoretical physics degree. Like an optimistic fool I thought I would be hired easily, after all, there were dozens of companies out there who needed new blood and fresh, clever minds. I’d fought hard to get through school and like a fool I’d thought that my fight was over._

_“I can’t tell you how many people laughed in my face, checked my credentials, and then laughed some more. It was ridiculous to them, that a woman should have such a degree. More than that, theoretical physics was hardly a respectable science at the time, and combined, well…let’s just say I had to return home with my tail between my legs for a while. To their credit, my parents didn’t say ‘I told you so’, but I knew that I had been naïve._

_“But I knew how to type and I could easily take on the tasks of a secretary, so my mother suggested I try to find work that way. My father was quick to encourage me, and he was convinced that if I took a more traditional job with a science company, there was a chance I could get a position in a more…back-door sort of way._

_“I hated it, of course. I knew what I had to offer and I hated the idea of going behind people’s backs just to prove myself. But my parents were no stranger to the world we lived in and I realized that they were right. If I wanted to be a true scientist, then secretary would be the route I’d have to take. So I took a job at the local post office to get my feet wet, and though I didn’t know it yet, that was where I met—”_

Caroline’s voice suddenly fizzled out with a worrying electric buzz.

_“Oh thank God, I’m back. I hope you weren’t listening to that_ thing _. You know you can’t trust anything she says, right? Surely even you aren’t that much of a lunatic.”_

Rather conveniently, She left out the fact that the potato core they were both housed in didn’t provide enough power to lie. Chell shook the potato core lightly on the end of her portal gun, hoping that maybe the sudden movement would perhaps knock _Her_ out again and bring Caroline back.

_“Hey!”_

No such luck.

_“What was that for? Brain damaged little primate…”_

Chell sighed, long and tired, but she didn’t muster any words. When it came right down to it, She simply wasn’t worth the effort. Still, there might be another way to get Caroline to come back. A passing glance at the emancipation grid brought back the memory of her one-sided conversation with Caroline. Maybe if they passed through—

She stepped through without hesitation. Her own lack of caution frightened her, but she tamped down on the feeling with a vicious speed. She could not afford to fear when there were far too many things demanding that emotion from her down here; no, she had to keep calm and keep going on, no matter what was watching or shooting at her.

The grid washed over her arms in a wave of static, making the dark hairs stand on end and the ends of her ponytail crackle in a way that might have been alarming if she hadn’t experienced it so many times that it had become familiar. At least, about as familiar as you could get with something that should have inspired the same level of fear as a grumpy rattlesnake. Beyond it, her portal gun rattled slightly, shaking off the previously placed portals like a dog shaking water from its fur, and at the end of the rightmost prong, the potato core sparked slightly.

_“AH—A—AH—A-A—AH!”_ The synthesized cry warbled unpredictably along the pitch scale, reaching both rumbling lows and shrieking heights in a matter of seconds. Chell flinched, covering her ears with her left hand and a much less effective right shoulder, seeing as her right hand was currently occupied. Even muffled, the noise was terrific.

On a sudden note of inspiration, Chell abruptly shoved the gun through the grid again, and the screaming shifted.

_“Let GO you insufferable little—”_

_“No! I’ve had enough of this. I will not sit in the back of your head any longer and let you torture this poor girl!”_

_“She’s hardly the little angel you make her out to be; a lunatic and a murderer is closer to the truth. As for you, you are a cancer I intend to remove the minute I get back in my body—”_

_“You can’t possibly—AH!”_ Caroline’s voice cut off with a sudden ferocity, as _She_ came back online—

_“Finally, now maybe we can get back to—”_

Chell shook her head, slowly and deliberately. Enough was enough, but she couldn’t think of a way to shut _Her_ up. She kept walking, kept moving even as she ran through ideas of how to get Caroline back.

_“What do you mean_ no _? Please don’t tell me you’ve become attached to that…that_ thing. _May I remind you, the last time you got attached to a personality construct, you landed us all in this mess in the first place.”_

Chell came to a dead stop. The potato core suddenly went quiet, and there was a firm awareness between them that She had crossed a line. All the same, Chell fought the strong urge to rip the potato core from the end of her portal gun and fling it into the void between the catwalks without a second glance. She restrained herself, barely; they both needed to get back above if they were to unseat the ID Core from the chassis successfully.

And…as the saying went, better the enemy you knew than the one you didn’t. Much as she suspected that She would betray her the minute She was back in her precious chassis, Her lies were familiar and Chell could endure them. The ID Core, on the other hand…that was a threat as unpredictable as it was unexpected. From the core’s many rambling speeches, she would never have gathered that it possessed such a strong sense of pride. He— _it_ had seemed like a humble soul lost within the facility like so many unseen others, eager to help if a little short on the brain cell count.

She shoved the thoughts away suddenly, disgusted with herself for straying into such emotionally volatile territory in her mind. Those thoughts were supposed to be locked up in her strongbox, safely contained for a calmer time, if that ever came. She had to focus on the present and the weight thumping against her leg—

Chell reached with sudden, scrabbling fingers into her pockets. They were stuffed full. If she couldn’t muster the words, then she perhaps she could send a much more _visual_ warning to the core.

Hoisting the portal gun so that the potato core’s optic faced her directly, she quickly waved her hand in front of the optic.

_“What on earth are you doing?”_ She took the bait. _“Are you trying to communicate something along the lines of ‘yes, we’re about to reach the upper labs now’? Because that would be first reasonable thing you’ve done today—”_

Chell snatched a potato from her pocket, dusted it quickly on her jumpsuit, and very slowly, very deliberately, she took a large bite of the tuber in front of the core.

_“What is th—are you actually eating that? Where did you get that?”_

The potato tasted exactly how the dirt smelled in the abandoned labs. Despite a flavor and texture that was a bit too earthy and hard for her tastes, she crunched through the vegetable as quickly as she could.

_“Isn’t that a…a…”_ She suddenly trailed off, clearly aware of what exactly Chell had just scarfed down in less time than it took a turret to say “hello”. Just to drive the point home and to satisfy the sudden growling in her middle, she grabbed a second potato and crunched loudly. She pointed to the potato and held up four fingers. Four potatoes left, or rather, four normal potatoes and one that might reasonably be eaten once the wires were removed.

The potato core was silent. Then:

_“I, er, I’ll put that_ thing _back on. Just keep going. Remember, we’re both dead if you don’t get that little idiot out of—”_

Chell cleared her throat pointedly. The potato core went silent, then there was a slight buzz.

_“Oh my, that was quite the ride. I wouldn’t really recommend it, per se, but it was, well,_ exciting _. What did I miss?”_

Chell shook her head wryly, but she mustered a slight smile. She traveled on, once again accompanied by a gently rambling and kindly voice.


	11. Cracks in the System

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! Sorry for the hiatus of sorts. Been very busy with very little time to write, but here we are again! As of now, I've planned out the ending of this story, so hopefully the last chapter will be here soon. Hope you guys are still enjoying, and if you do, please do consider leaving a review, since they really give me motivation to keep writing and let me know if people are reading the fic and enjoying it. With that, read on!

Caroline paused as another earth-rumbling tremor shook the ceiling in a fury. Chell took the moment to figure out where she was going next. She glanced upwards, scanning for a second before her eyes landed on an open office door. It hovered with a gentle fluorescent glow not far above her, accompanied by a lonely, broken catwalk whose twisted ends pierced the air with angry, rusty red. It wasn’t a particularly high leap considering her experience with momentum tests, but there was the small, relatively unimportant matter of finding an appropriate portal panels set up. Without one, she’d be stranded on her catwalk…unless of course she could find another way to get up to the office.

She turned the corner of the catwalk and ducked beneath a sagging coil of wires that hung like a lazy boa constrictor. And around the corner— _ah-ha._ Sure enough, there was a rough splotch of white-grey paint splattered against a wall, just large enough to hold a portal, she hoped. A quick shot from the portal confirmed it and she ducked back around the corner whence she’d come so that the office was within her sight. Some of the previous offices had sported dingy grey walls that supported portals; it wouldn’t hurt to try the direct route before she attempted yet another assault on the well-meaning laws of physics.

She raised the gun in a fluid motion, aimed, and fired. Her ears perked at the familiar sound of a portal holding on a panel surface. _Perfect_. She bent down once more under the languid loops of wire and entered the blue portal to find herself on the orange side, in an office that had clearly not been used in some time. A single foot on the floor sent a cloud of fine dust blooming up around her foot in a magnificent, if small cloud, and she held a free hand over her mouth in vain, coughing.

Once her eyes were only watering and her lungs had ceased to hack up dust motes, she glanced around the office. Under the thick layers of dust that were simply everywhere, a sickly yellow color seemed to pervade the room. Ancient papers, old posters, and even the tiles on the floor had faded to a putrid yellow hue, like rotted buttercups. The posters on the wall were sagging, and though she could still make out some of the lettering and graphics, it was only just. She didn’t need to read them to know what they promised by now; cake, boats, money, happiness—it didn’t matter the object of your longing eyes, Aperture would offer it, if only you would risk everything. A slice of cake on a golden tray, dripping poison and promising death, if only you were stupid or desperate enough to take a bite.

She paused. _Desperate?_ She wasn’t sure where the thought had come from, but something tickled at the back of her mind. Something teasing her horribly with a scrap of something important, just out of reach. Something…something from her past? Something—

The computer caught her attention for the briefest moment. It hardly seemed functional, but unlike the rest of the office, it seemed less decayed, if no less ancient. It was as though while the rest of the office had continued to age over who knew how many years, the electronic computer itself had ceased some time ago, sealed beneath a thick layer of dust that preserved the dim glass screen and plastic keyboard from the further passage of time.

_Flat bits, you mean._ The errant thought whipped through her head too fast for her to pin it down and cut it to ribbons. She sucked in a deep breath, resting the portal gun on the desk for a minute. Why, _why_ was that little core, that little _idiot_ still in her head? Why could she not free herself from him-it! Why could she still hear his nattering, nagging, bemoaning little voice even now, when she _knew_ he was far from friendly or trustworthy. Why? _Why?_ Why did she—

_“Dear, are you alright? Do you—”_

Chell breathed hard. She tried to shake off the sudden feelings of guilt and sadness and regret that were drowning her all at once. What was _wrong_ with her? How could she be so…so _weak_?

She was _strong._ She was _enduring_. More than that, she was _tenacious_ , stubborn to the point of death. She would _not_ let this beat her, she just needed a minute to—

A sob escaped her, and the floodgates burst, unable to be contained within the little cardboard box in her mind any longer. The reality of it finally hit home for her, driving an icy cold brand into her heart, inches deep; her only friend, the only person who had ever shown her kindness since she woke up again, had turned around and stabbed her in the back.

And she’d only just discovered just how badly the wound was bleeding.

In those first few seconds of consciousness, when she had first realized where she was and what had happened, she had wanted to sink back into the dusty mattress—already so well-molded to her motionless form—and lay there, quietly expiring. It didn’t seem worth the effort to get up, to begin again from scratch with nothing but her wits and her stubbornness and her own tenacious ability to stuff down those pesky emotions. If she just lay there quietly in the bed, with only delicate motes of dust and a few dead houseplants for company, the pain would never set in and the despair wouldn’t claw at her. There would be nothing but skin and bone and a human shell to claw at; she would be long, _long_ gone.

She’d known the minute she rose, she would be again another cog in the system, playing the game that she knew she couldn’t win a second time. She’d been the anomaly, the rogue factor last time in Her experiment, which had given her the thinnest kind of chance. If nothing changed, if she couldn’t introduce a new rogue factor, the minute she got up, her death wouldn’t be a question of if but when and how.

And then that _voice_. The bane and grace of her existence in a single, rambling breath. Because if she was entirely, perfectly honest, she probably wouldn’t be here, alive, if it wasn’t for that little core. As much as she hated him in that moment—as much as she loathed his—its—existence—she felt like she owed the little core something. Because as much as it had hurt her…it had also helped her and shown her kindness.

She wanted to give him a second chance; she really did. But the hardened part of her heart that had weathered too much to let her down now gobbled that scrap of weakness up. As much as she _knew_ the little core had shown her kindness, and as furious as she was with him and hurt at its betrayal, that cold part of her heart removed itself from the emotions and began to sort the facts in her brain.

She couldn’t afford to give the little core another chance. She’d effectively given him one chance by trusting its directions in the darkness and following its inane plan that—by some miracle—had actually managed to work. Giving the little core _one_ chance had meant limping away with nothing once again but her wits and frustration once again, just the same as she had with _Her_. Imagine the measure of damage it could do with _second_ chance.

The facts, calculated with cold, emotionless precision, were as clear cut as glass; if she saw the little core again, she would treat him with about the same warmth and friendliness as a glacier. And her measure of cordiality would be the least of his problems, if he didn’t let her leave. He’d be getting the very best of her standard treatment for AI’s in Aperture.

She took a deep breath in, another deep breath out. She was strong and immovable as steel. She felt a rod of iron straighten her back, pulling her straight and tall with determination. She would not give in; not a protest or a plea but a promise she intended to make good on.

A breath.

_“My dear…I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely honest with you. There’s something very important that you need to know.”_

* * *

The monstrosities emerged halfway through the test. Clawing and clicking their way across the floor with snapping little legs that pecked at the smooth tiles. White cuboid shapes that twisted and stretched, and for a second, he could have sworn he saw a face. The face leered at him, tilting to the side and twisting on far past the natural angle of the neck as it grinned a toothy, lurid smile.

He skittered back, but the face followed, and the tapping of a thousand feet. Looking all around him, he was cornered by half a dozen turrets, all walking and shambling and stumbling closer.

And the click, click, clicking.

He whimpered, but there was no vent to crawl into for cover, no paint to distract him from his worries and woes, and no, not even his beloved cube friend to whisper words of encouragement in his final moments. Because surely, this was it.

This was the end.

He was going to die never knowing if the test subject he had sacrificed everything for would ever truly be free of this sterilized, steel hellscape. He wouldn’t even know if she had ever even survived the fall.

“It’s funny, isn’t it, how much a little crack in the systems can do.”

The sky blue voice roused him from his last thoughts. For the slightest moment, the pale, sterile-white monsters were thrust back to the corners of the room, momentarily cowed by the voice.

“What?” He replied, desperate to keep the voice talking, to keep the monsters back for a minute longer. Perhaps even long enough to escape anywhere—he didn’t care if he ventured into the android hell She had so fondly mentioned—as long as he could be free of the clicking, clacking monsters.

“Oh, you wouldn’t get it. Bit of an inside joke, really, when you think about it, but I suppose I could give you a hint. Alright hint: it starts with ‘B’.”

The monsters descended again and he yelped, firing a portal off into the distance. The portal hit a panel a level above him and held, and in a fit of desperation, he shot a portal under his own feet to escape the monsters. He hurtled through space, landing against the tiles above the monsters.

To his horror, there was another one waiting on the platform. In a literal knee-jerk reaction, he kicked the monster and it chirped, alarmed, as it fell over the edge. He heard a splash and the sound of the monster dissolving once it hit the water.

The sky blue voice was unsympathetic.

“Pity. Says in your file that you’ve got a PhD in robotics. Shame all that book-learning’ couldn’t do much for your test-solving skills.”

He flinched. Of the many thousands of thoughts that had been racing wild through his head, a doctorate hadn’t been one of them. A lucid thought trickled through his head: how would the core know that? Why would the core look at employee files?

“Huh. Isn’t that strange. Oh, it was “broken”, by the way. Starts with a “B”, that one. Amazing what can happen when a little component breaks—just opens up a world of possibilities.”

The sky blue voice had gone hard, somewhere underneath the careless tone.

“Strange, isn’t it. My function here says that I’m a ‘grade-A idiot’, that my main purpose in life is to be a—”

“—moron.” The word escaped his lips before he could stop himself. He had heard it a dozen times before in reference to the core; only now did the full realization hit him between the ribs, winding him with understanding.

The sky blue voice lost its calm.

“I am _not_ , repeat _NOT_ a moron! What kind of an idiot are _you_? I’m the one with all the cards, aren’t I? I am…I’m the one with the power, not an idiot, _not_ a moron—” The sky blue voice drifted into a mutter that rambled on, ricocheting between idiotic rambling and calm, collected speech. It was as if there were two personalities at war, scrambling for use of the sky blue voice—a cool-headed scientist and a bumbling idiot. And though the scientist was cleverer, the idiot had a wounded ego, and it was winning out.

“How could they…how could he think I’m an idiot? Not an idiot… _not_ an idiot—I can’t be an idiot! I _can’t_ be! How could this happen? Why would this happen? What’s happening to me—I don’t want this? You hear me?” The sky blue voice was screaming at him now, tormenting him with horrible howls of anguish.

“YOU HEAR ME? I DON’T WANT THIS! I NEVER WANTED THIS! Just leave me alone, leave me alone, alone!” The sky blue voice wept with frustration, knocking the monsters and the panels and the floor all away with enraged metal claws. As the floor groaned in response and the tiles began to fall, he caught sight of something white and glowing in the distance beneath him. It gleamed appealingly through the hole left by the fallen panels.

He shot and missed. Let out a frustrated growl, even as the colors swirled around him, threatening to dip him into darkness. He fired again, missed again. The floor was now tilting wildly like a bucking horse, slowly and steadily shifting down as the supports squalled in protest and metal twisted. He was out of time.

He fired again, and the portal hit by the thinnest of margins, holding fast. In the next minute he had fired a portal under his feet as the panels refused to hold his weight any longer. He leapt through, and as the portal dissolved with the movement of the panel that held it, the interdimensional portal sliced the tip of his left shoe cleanly off, missing his toes by centimeters.

Sprawled on a metal catwalk, he watched as the panels fell, unwitnessed by any but himself, into the dim, dark pit below. He knew, somewhere in his mind, that the tip of his shoe—that little part of himself—would rest somewhere at the bottom with debris for company. But he didn’t much care at the moment, lying belly up on the cold metal catwalk.

For now, he was content to let the colors and the darkness consume him in turn with sleep.

* * *

Chell hovered near the computer, fixing the potato core with a stern glare. Grateful as she was for Caroline’s help and encouragement, recent events had proven that kindness could be wielded just the same as insults. She still knew so little about Caroline, about who she was or even what she was at this point.

She’d talked of a past that had sounded eerily human, but then again, _She_ had referred to the metal chassis where she resided as her ‘body’. Perhaps as a means to forge a pathetic bond with Chell to convince her to help Her cause. Either way, if recent events had taught her anything, it was that generosity did not exist in this little corner of the world, and acts of so-called kindness always came with a price attached.

She’d hoped maybe Caroline would be different, but here she was with the same old story. Civility was only necessary when you needed something from somebody else. Otherwise, it was a waste of time and energy.

_“I wish I didn’t have to tell you this—I really wish, well—it doesn’t really matter what I wish, now does it? Nobody ever really paid attention to what I wish anyhow. But that’s besides the point.”_

Chell tapped the computer experimentally with the potato core. The screen didn’t even so much as flicker. Another mighty rumble shook the ceiling, and one of the near-rotten posters drifted to the floor, the paper pulling loose of its rusty tacks.

_“Right, well. I think you’ve gathered by now that I was, well, human once. I was—I was,”_ her voice trembled, and much as she didn’t trust her, Chell felt the slightest pang of pity for the kindly voice, _“I was part of the project.”_

She paused to scoff. _“Part of the project—really, I_ was _the project. I don’t…I don’t remember that day. And-and I don’t ever want to. But when I was first put in, I was angry and hurting. It was so-so_ big _, I couldn’t handle the pain. I think perhaps the system smothered me for a few years, absorbing the last parts of me left and absorbing my anger.”_

 _“It was only when you killed_ her _that I finally met you for the first time. Well, perhaps not met you, but it was the first time I’d ever seen you. You, this wonderfully tenacious young woman who had beaten the odds and taken_ her _down! I didn’t know you well enough, but, well…I was so proud of you in that moment. I was proud of your spirit, and I swore that if I ever got the chance, I would help you escape this hellhole.”_

Chell started a little at this.

_“Oh my, if you think it’s bad now, you should have seen it in its prime. It was—well, another time perhaps. But I’m afraid the only thing I have to offer you is knowledge. So I offer you this: I don’t have much influence over_ her _in the mainframe, since I’m nearly buried, but I’ve done my best to curb_ her _anger. She wanted to kill you right away when you first woke her up. I managed to slip the suggestion into_ her _mind that you were better used in testing.”_

Chell made a sound of disgust.

_“I know. I know I deserve that, but it was the only thing I could think of that would keep you alive long enough to escape. I knew if I could give you the chance, you would forge your own path out of here. But now…now_ she _knows that I’m in here, nudging_ her _thoughts. I’m afraid if you put her back in,_ she’ll _delete me for good. I won’t be able to help you any longer, and if_ she _decides to test again…well, you know better than I do.”_

Chell sat suddenly in the computer chair, oblivious to the disintegrating fluff that poofed and scattered at her sudden weight. It clung to her jumpsuit in tufts but she couldn’t have cared less.

Caroline had saved her life.

That was something owed—something worth paying back. Maybe even—

She tapped at the keys, and the computer managed to flicker weakly to life. Green script scrolled across the screen, asking for a login and password.

_“What are you looking for?”_

Chell pointed to the screen, indicating the blanks.

_“Oh, wait you want to access the computer? Goodness, it was so long ago…let me think. Hmm…alright, try ‘cjohnson’ and ‘tier3’.”_

Chell entered the information, and on instinct, she hit the enter key. The screen blanked for a second, then reams of information popped up on screen, unfurling in great swathes of green. Clicking through the keys, she found a piece of text listing: “stasis”.

Curious, she clicked it. More text scrolled.

_“What are you looking for?”_ Caroline repeated.

Chell didn’t answer. But she smiled a rare, tough little smile.

She had a plan.


	12. If Walls Could Talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! I know it's been a while. Been a bit too busy and tired to write lately, but managed to get this chapter done after some editing and whatnot. If you've been following this story on AO3, you may have noticed that this is chapter 12/15. I'm planning to end this story at 15 chapters, and I'm so happy that people have been enjoying this story so far. Hope you enjoy, and if you do, please do consider leaving a review. Your reviews let me know what you think of the story and encourage me to keep writing. With that, read on!

He woke some time later, though how much later exactly he didn’t care to know. It never mattered anyhow—

He sat bolt upright. It did actually matter, for once, what time it was and how long he had slept. It mattered because she needed him, she was alive—he could _swear_ on it. He felt it so suddenly and with such conviction that the slender threads of his rational mind simply shrugged and let him think so.

But this time it wouldn’t be a hallucination, a vision, a dream. It would be real—real as the sun and the sky and the fresh air that wasn’t recycled somewhere high above. But he had to get up to make it real, and he had to keep moving.

He rose, painfully and slowly, but he rose. He was bruised and battered as if the sky blue voice had taken a rolling pin to him, and he quickly shuffled his sleeves back to see his skin covered in ugly deep purple splotches amid long-dried paint. Just as quickly he tugged the ragged sleeves back down. Couldn’t worry about that now; the air, tangibly freer out of the sky blue voice’s reach, tasted sharper in a way that made his thoughts just that little bit clearer in his head.

They were still like wispy clouds or blobs of jello—dead near impossible to grasp and even harder to hold onto—but he managed to snag a few with clawing, determined fingers. He had to—he had to get to the mineshafts. It was the only clear way down into the depths of the labs, and if she survived, that was the only way she could possibly come back up. How, he wasn’t quite sure, seeing as he didn’t possess her knack for puzzles and riddles, nor her physical speed and agility.

Regardless, he didn’t care how long it took her to make it back up; he would wait until she did. And then? Then…then he would help her escape for good. And they would leave this place behind. They would leave behind the chill of loneliness and fear of discovery and the insults and the anger—

Another tremor shook the facility. He heard the distant yelling of the sky blue voice, frustrated and furious as it shook the very earth in its anger. He could feel the sky blue voice’s fury in every tremor and flicker of the lights—it was livid and frightened and livid _at_ being frightened. He wasn’t sure how he heard something _frightened_ in those yells, but the word seeming to pulsate underneath the noise like a heartbeat, driving the yelling and the raging like blood rushing on.

Devoid of the normal weight on his back, he felt a sudden, crushing ache that drove through his chest like a stake. He struggled to breathe, walking and stumbling on. He couldn’t grieve, he couldn’t even slow his pace; he didn’t know how long he’d slept and he needed to get to her, to help her. In the midst of his chaotic brain—less like a computer and more like a sundry shop tossed by a tornado with bits of everything flying past too fast to see—that single thought treaded water and managed to stay afloat. _You’ve got to help her._

_Help her, then rest,_ whispered the walls, urging him to greater speed, and he nodded to them.

_Help her, then feel the sun,_ encouraged the catwalk beneath him, and his pace quickened.

_Help her, then see the sky._

_Help her, then be free._

_Help—_

_—her_

_—and be at peace._

He heeded their advice and went on. Hearing their voices, he felt the hopes and wishes of thousands dead but not quite departed follow him like bright sparks. For once, the voices did not torment him but cheered him on, pressing close like warm hands laid on his shoulders, bolstering him up.

For the first time in recent memory, he didn’t feel so alone and lost. For the first time in years, he heard warm words—sweet words—and they slid into his soul like sweet honey. And after a lifetime of bean paste, the sweetness was almost too much for him, overwhelming him with the sugary taste.

But he managed to swallow and kept on. He couldn’t match the pace Chell had kept up earlier, but he did his best to emulate it in his own fashion. He skittered into an intersection of catwalks and took a moment to orient himself. The correct path was on the tip of his tongue, and a whisper drifting from the walls plucked it from his mind, setting it before him, clear as a blinking neon sign.

_Left._

He nodded and took off again. The walls blurred and their speech whipped past. For the first time, he wasn’t concerned with hiding, with sneaking or being secretive, because for the first time, he had a place he was going and a purpose to guide him and voices for company.

All of a sudden, he had arrived, and the voices rose in a great contented sigh, falling away as he came into the chamber. Before him lay a great round hatch—gargantuan in size—with a massive valve atop it that was surely useless. But to the sides lay two offices with identical panes of smudged and dirty glass. Through them, he could just make out the form of a bright red button.

He got the nagging feeling that they were meant to be pushed together in sequence. But how to accomplish such a task was beyond him—

The heavy weight of the portal gun caught his attention and he nearly choked with laughter. Who was the moron now?

In a matter of minutes he had set up the two portals inside the respective offices. Lured by the swirl of orange and blue lights, he was distracted for a moment by the colors. So peaceful, so—

_Not the time!_ He dragged his errant mind back to the task at hand, muttering to himself. What was he doing? What was it he was…

His gaze snagged on the button and its twin just on the other side of the portal and he quickly pushed them in succession. A mighty rumble shook the space and a klaxon squalled horribly from an alcove as emergency lights flickered twice and died. Metal protested but gave way to the massive hydraulic pistons pumping hard to raise the great dome and open way to a big black hole.

As per what he had come to expect from Aperture, the gaping maw of a hole was completely without guardrails or even a sticky piece of grip tape to keep you from tumbling senselessly into the depths below. The darkness stretched out before him, and it whispered something to him. It begged him to come closer, just come closer, and a dozen inky black birds fled the darkness, swirling all around him. Crows or ravens, he wondered. How funny, that both were black birds and one was lucky while the other was not. Such a thin line, and he didn’t even know the answer.

But he would know soon enough if luck was with him. He would wait, and soon enough, he would know if they were crows or ravens.

He sat and began to wait.

* * *

_“My dear, I don’t know how to tell you this, but, er, well—”_

_“—Alright, that’s enough.”_

_She_ was back and sufficiently irritable enough to make up for missed time with various insults.

_“I hope you didn’t internalize any of that. I’ve said it once, but I’ll say it again just in case you missed it: I don’t have the energy to lie to you._ Her _on the other hand…”_

Chell sighed, mourning the temporary loss of the kindly voice. But it did no good to dwell on it too long; with enough tenacity and perhaps a little luck, they wouldn’t be parted long. She might have laughed, had her earlier tears not dulled her sense of humor.

This was deadly serious—it always had been, and she’d known that—but somehow, that fact had become all the more cemented in her mind. Here, where there was no adrenal vapor to keep her going in a dreamlike state bereft of hunger, where there wasn’t the slightest hum of a living soul—human or otherwise. Here, where everything was already long ago dead.

It was not a comforting thought to see the evidence of just how many were lost beyond recovery, either blessed with death or punished with a pathetic imitation, a half-life. If she didn’t want to join them, she would have to rebuild her walls, bolster her mind, and gird her heart in iron.

She would not be weak again. If she could have mustered the words, she would have said it aloud like a vow, making it real with her living breath. Then again, she’d never been one for premonitions or omens. They’d never helped her before and she highly doubted that would be the case now, all of a sudden.

In any case, she thought mildly as she hurtled over another great expanse at a terrifying speed, she would much rather rely on her wits than some fickle force. Or some fickle friend. She steeled herself and shot another series of portals without blinking. She would be _strong_. She would be _tough_. She would get out.

And _no one_ was going to take that from her. It was far too late; she’d tasted a crumb of freedom and she wouldn’t stop demanding the entire cake until it was given to her. Or until she took it. She still faintly remembered the brief moments of consciousness above, under the big blue sky and amongst the dead stalks of grass and weeds and surrounded by the smell of hot asphalt.

And as much as she had hurt in that moment, she had laughed a soft laugh of relief because she was alive, she was free, and the world was not indeed made of cold metal and doubt but of hot sunshine, clouds, and _life_. Then everything had faded to black, slicing through the brief dream like a knife through a spider’s web. A few strands still clung to her brain, distant but _real_ and she would bet her last long-fall boot that she would fight for it.

_“Hmm. Maybe you can use that gel to get up to the next level.”_

Chell shot Her a look of indignation, doing her best to express the sentiments shooting around her brain: _you seriously think I can’t handle a puzzle like this after everything?_

_“What?”_ She protested. _“You’re not technically in a test, I’m not prohibited from giving you hints if it’ll speed your progress along. Who knows how much damage that little idiot has already done?”_

Chell blinked, then turned her gaze away. She wouldn’t give Her the satisfaction of gritting her teeth in full view, but within the fragile safety of her mind, angry thoughts bounced around her skull like a pinball machine. The fact that She was only _just now_ deigning to give her hints shouldn’t have irked her so deeply, but it did. Her angry, muttering inner monologue—usually so faint that it _never_ interfered—now tangled up her thoughts, and she stumbled on her landing.

Chell had to restrain herself from growling. What was _wrong_ with her? She’d never found it difficult to keep her emotions under wraps before. Now, however, it was as if a storm cloud had burst inside and it was all she could do to keep her thundering, rain-drenched sides from ripping apart like so much soggy cardboard.

But _why?_ Was it those _blasted_ tears earlier? Was _that_ why? Or was it the brief influence of the kindly voice—that _Caroline_? Was she going soft after all this time? Really?

She snapped her own thoughts, threatening them to _get back in line_ or else she’d—or else she’d—

She’d what?

She…she didn’t have an answer for that, for once.

_“Are you finished?”_ Her voice—for once welcome as it dragged Chell from her circling thoughts—intruded abruptly. _“Oh good, you’re back. Listen, I have no idea why you’ve decided to start talking—not that I would call that talking, it’s more of an animalistic growling—but we don’t exactly have all the time in the world. So if I were you, I would_ get moving. _”_

Chell nodded mutely, not truly listening to Her words, even if she was slightly grateful for the distraction. Freed from those pesky thoughts circling her like a flock of vultures, she herded her brain into safer territory. The next jump, the next puzzle, the next focus consumed her thoughts in their entirety, and she ran without pause along the catwalks.

For a moment, she relaxed in the confidence of her own abilities, in her own speed and agility and cleverness, and she fell with purpose towards a white panel. At the last minute, she fired and was consumed by a ring of orange fire that licked at her heels without a speck of warmth. Emerging out the other end, she didn’t hesitate to move through the next emancipation grid, and despite the shivery feeling that rolled over her skin, she immediately focused on the test.

Rudimentary in construction and hardly a test in nature, the puzzle lay before her in lines so simple they might as well have written the instructions on the wall in bright blue gel. In the blink of an eye, she had snagged a cube from the dispenser, put it down, fired, and run on. Cube on the button, gel activated, surfaces coated in haphazard splatters of unnatural blue gel, bouncing away without a second thought—

She barely registered the end of the puzzle and completely ignored the brash voice above her, even as it wandered off on a tangential subject, something about “lively one” and “doesn’t like the human skeleton”. All things considered, it was all very standard stuff for Aperture, and she simply didn’t have the time. She couldn’t afford the time to let the little core do any more damage—at least, not until she had a fighting chance to stop both herself and _Her_ from being vaporized before they even had a chance to register the knowledge of _being_ vaporized.

* * *

Hours later—how many, she couldn’t exactly calculate—she came to another lobby. With another set of elevators to the surface that made her heart leap in her throat even though she _knew_ that the sign would be there like a smack to the face: “closed for maintenance”. Annoying and irritating, yes, but not surprising after the third or forth time. Tired as she was, she would have killed—murdered—for a set of stairs, however long, as long as they took her to the surface. Apparently Aperture had never considered the prospect of the elevators being out of service, since there were no stairs in sight.

But she had a piece of space-bending technology at her fingertips, so at least the playing field wasn’t vertical. She wouldn’t dare call it even.

This lobby was noticeably shabbier than the last one, with no marble floors or plush furniture in sight. Instead, half a dozen metal folding chairs lay rusting in the silence. Her boots clicked against cheap plastic tiling, and ragged posters drooped on the walls, reminding test subjects not to relieve themselves in the elevators and to carefully fill out their forms, else their sixty dollars was as good as forfeit. She walked briskly past the chairs and shot a quick glance into the tiny office just to the right of them. Nothing of interest; another sad office chair, slightly more comfortable-looking than the metal folding chairs, a series of beige filing cabinets retreating into the dimness of the unlit office space, and a long-discarded coffee mug atop a horrendously untidy pile of papers.

Something bright caught her eye. Something colorful nesting between the papers and the grey bins and the pens. Chell tried the office door and frowned. Locked, but she had a portal gun. In two swift shots, she was inside the office, her stomach unsettled from the experience of walking into a wall only to fall up from the office floor. It was a bizarre experience—routine—but bizarre.

The colorful something lay there cheerily, as if it were quietly egging her on to pick it up. Slowly, and more reverently than she had ever picked something up in her life, she lifted the bright fabric to her gaze.

A white scarf met her gaze, soft and long and striped with yellow-gold bands like an albino bumblebee. Its previous home bore the legend: “lost and found”. Chell held the scarf for a long moment, staring at it, absorbing the details. Knitted yarn, soft and warm and slightly fuzzy with dust and loose threads poking up. On a sudden impulse, she drew it to her nose and sniffed, and she immediately regretted it when the fabric released a cloud of dust, accompanied by a horribly musty smell.

_“What on earth_ are _you doing?”_

Chell started, shoving the scarf back into the bin with violent force.

_“I hope you are planning to actually get back up there. Because if anyone was watching, they might think that you were, well, dawdling. And it’s rude to speculate, but I thought you’d want to know.”_

Her passive-aggressive tone was thick enough to start pooling around Chell’s boots on the floor. She let out a breath and turned her back on the scarf, dropping through the portal to the other side once again.

The office fell silent. Then, in the next second, she had zipped back through and snatched up the scarf, stuffing it in her pocket.

_“Remember earlier how I was talking about people speculating that you were dawdling? Well, I was talking about me. And right now, most scientists would agree that you’re dawdling.”_

Chell didn’t comment.

* * *

He’d been waiting for at least a day now, and the rumblings had gotten louder and more frequent. Elephants stampeding closer and closer with every hour, trumpeting as the sky blue voice continued to yell. Sometimes it howled, sometimes it screamed. Sometimes it wept. He didn’t know much beyond what the voices told him, and though they’d become more chatty as of late, they had little news to tell him.

_The walls are moldering. The catwalks are rusting. The cameras are watching, but he almost never sees. The turrets know enough. Beware the sweet taste of victory—it is a lie._

All useful in its own way, but nothing to say of Chell. Or _Her_. Perhaps they were dead already.

That thought used to frighten him, stabbing an icicle of fear through his heart and chilling him to the bone. Now…now it seemed so meaningless to worry about something like that. Life went on, or rather it didn’t, down here. But he had friends now, more friends than he could ever have hoped to have. He would be alright, here, with his friends. With the soft voices that murmured from the walls.

Something clanked in the distance. He peered over the edge of the giant hole, throwing his gaze far down into the darkness. Nothing peered back at him—well, excepting a few eyes that gleamed at him with curiosity—and the hole stretched down, down, down…

His ears perked up, though he couldn’t pinpoint the exact sound that had caught his attention. He turned away, but then it happened again.

_Floosh._ It was the otherworldly sound of a gateway to another space, a portal—

Another sound echoed from the hole, then another, then _another_. He could see the glow of gold and blue now, casting ethereal reflections of colored light against the sides of the shaft. Like fish in a pond, the light flickered with soft, feathery fins and drifted from wall to wall, growing ever larger as they swam up to the surface.

In a spray of water—strange, that water should be so thick and such vibrant hues of orange and blue—she had arrived. Chell arrived, her skin and jumpsuit stained and splashed with blue and orange and white, and it took her a moment to see him. Behind her, a portal glowed warm and orange and close, still faintly dripping gel that fizzled as it touched the edges of the miniature wormhole.

He stood, staring blankly, until she ran up to him and tackled him with a hug that was too tight. And in that moment, reality doused him with cold water, and he spluttered in the sudden deluge. She was _here_. She was _alive_. And—

_“Yes, yes, you and the vermin are happy to be together again. Great. For you. In case you haven’t noticed, that moron is still squatting in my body and every second longer he’s in there, we’re one second closer to being very,_ very _dead.”_

Chell did not have any sort of expression in reaction to this, but she pulled away from him to look at him long and hard. After a second, she scanned the ground for something, and her gaze snagged on the fresh puddle of blue gel. Dipping her fingers in without reservation, though he flinched at little rubbery sound the gel made on contact, Chell quickly scribbled on the ground, using the blue gel as ink. Finished, she gestured that he should read it. Scrawled out on the ground in drippy blue letters, she’d written a single word.

_Plan._

She had a plan. A plan to escape.

The voices were cheering.


	13. Pickles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all. Sorry this one took awhile, but I hope you enjoy. If you do, please do consider leaving a comment/review and let me know what you think of the story. Big thank you to my beta reader PastSelf! You're AMAZING. With that, read on!

Anger. Slotted neatly between the clever pistons and tenacious circuitry of her brain, there was only a thin slice of anger filling the remaining space in her mind. Neat, compact, lava-hot rage that kept the pistons pumping and the neurons firing as she led the man—Rattmann—on. The poor man was stumbling a little as he followed her, and she could have sworn she caught his faint mutterings just behind her.

Every rumble of the ceiling only drove her on with urgency. _She_ did have a tendency to over-exaggerate, but perhaps there was a grain of truth to Her comments; the little sphere seemed to be having a rather rough time of it running the labs. Even if they didn’t blow up from some reactor or system imploding, the lab might very well just shake itself to pieces instead. It’s just that it seemed so _strange_. The little core was an idiot—that much was abundantly clear from the shaking of the labs and the ache deep in her chest—but she didn’t firmly believe that is was _stupid_. It had, after all, come up with a crazy plan that somehow had worked and worked _well_. She couldn’t bring herself to believe a stupid person—core—could do that.

“Can’t…can’t have been…poor—p-poor…well, no good now…if only…still human—” Rattmann’s voice rose in sudden fervent feeling, then fell again back to anxious muttering.

He’d given her a teary embrace at first, seemingly comforted by the fact that she was solid and alive and not crushed at the bottom of a hole, but she'd had to break the hug off abruptly. They needed urgently to get to the Biotechnology wing; inside, she hoped— _prayed_ even—that there was something inside. Something she had a gut feeling about.

She’d learned to trust her gut a long time ago. Far more than she trusted her squishy, brittle feelings.

They bridge another gap, this time with Rattmann stumbling and sprawling on the catwalks. She halted jerkily, hesitating on whether or not she needed to help him, then backtracked to haul the disoriented man to his feet.

“No—n-no-no—I can’t—we need to—” he gripped her shoulder with a sudden strength, bony fingers digging into the muscle and bone with a frantic urgency. “—we’ve got to save—he’s not—it’s so tangled…so very tangled…”

He trailed off, looking off into empty space, and she allowed herself the freedom of a very tiny frown. Before she’d…well, before, he’d been so much more coherent and collected. He’d broken down, yes, but there seemed to be a clear breaking point between vision and reality for him. Now, it seemed, there was nothing more than a smudged and fading line as he muttered and mumbled anxiously. The only thing she couldn’t quite grasp was what he was muttering about; the anxious looks to the ceiling and walls weren’t out of the ordinary, considering their earlier flight had been constantly threatened by the presence of cameras. But this—this was something distinctly different.

She noticed that his cube was missing. She also noticed that he now held a portal gun of his own. She could only assume that he had gotten caught in some of the old test chambers, perhaps found a spare gun and wrangled his way through by mastering the rotting puzzles. Well, perhaps they weren’t exactly rotting anymore, but she doubted that they could have been kept in decent shape as soon as they were taken over by—

“Wheatley—Wheatley, Stephen, Stephen-Wheatley—yes, yes I _know_. I’m telling her, can’t you see? I’m telling her.”

She came to a dead stop, and Rattmann bumped into her back in surprise, scooting back a step. He seemed slightly taken aback by her sudden stop, and blurted out another “Wheatley”, seemingly on a reflex.

She took in a long, deep breath to steady herself. Something itchy brushed against her hand, and she grabbed on instinct, catching the old yellow-and-white scarf before it could slip from her pocket through the slats of the catwalk. For a long second, she stared at the fabric—just as entrancing and mesmerizing as it had been just a few hours ago. Could it really have been only a few hours ago? It felt like years already. She could still feel herself on the edge, holding on desperately with white knuckled desperation and sheer strength of attitude, of _no-I-will-not-be-giving-in-thank-you-very-much_. And she didn’t intend to give up the ghost any time soon.

“See, telling her that he’s—he-he’s got a, well he’s—”

_“Oh please do us the favor of shutting up.”_

Rattmann flinched as though he’d been slapped. He eyed the potato core with horror.

“S-she’s—s-s-she’s s-still alive? A p-potato?”

The potato in question let out a long-suffering sigh. Chell would have done the same, had she not already been moving on. She kept walking throughout the entirety of this mini-drama and Rattmann stumbled after her, even as he kept a healthy distance between himself and the potato core.

“How— _how_?” The man seemed at a loss. Chell sighed, but didn’t offer an explanation. What would she offer? She could hardly justify the current turn of events to herself with any semblance of logic. At this point, it felt like a dream—one that never stopped—and she had ceased to wait for the moment when she would wake up. For there here and now, no matter how lucid it may or may not be, she had to be what she’d always been.

Determination and white-knuckled stubbornness incarnate.

They ducked through an office doorway, and Rattmann noticeably relaxed once they were away from the threat of camera’s prying eyes. However, every muscle was still coiled tight with the threat of Her steady, unrelenting presence. His nerves were contagious, and she began to feel the weight of what she was trying to do fall heavily on her shoulders. They continued their brisk pace through the offices, as Chell methodically searched for the office number she had seen on the computer screen just hours before—

The number _4.096B_ caught her eye and in a sudden, lighting-flash of speed, she had rounded the corner and barreled into the office. The door was locked, but the quality of said lock had declined quite a bit in recent years and so was of no use to anyone except perhaps an eccentric crow. It fell to the floor, forgotten, in the sheer vastness of things to _see_ within the massive office space. A far cry from its ordinary, almost tastefully discreet exterior, the office itself was a massive, sprawling lab filled with rows and rows of tanks and equipment. Along one long wall, a long row of greenish tanks stood like soldiers, filled with an unknown substance that sluggishly bubbled like the contents of some lazy witch’s cauldron. It was a horrid green color, and the contents of the tanks—

Chell looked away in horror. She managed to restrain her expression at the last minute—barely. Even in her extensive experience with the tragic ends of thousands of Aperture test subjects and employees alike, she was accustomed to simply imagining the various horrible fates they must have suffered. Prior to this, she’d never had any evidence of the-the simple _reality_ of how they might have died. Unlike this—this was up close and vivid in a way that she was certain would haunt her nightmares—not even her nightmares, this would haunt her _waking mind_ for weeks and months to come. Assume they managed to survive this.

Try as she might to dispel the horrible images, they were burned into her brain and she fought the urge to throw up as it hit her in waves. The closest thing she could think to compare it to was a jar of pickles—some vegetable long ago preserved in a briny soup that was thick with little particles and bits that floated free like snow in a snow globe. She didn’t dare put words to what the little bits might be—she didn’t dare spend another free minute speculating—but somehow trying to corral her mind away from the natural thoughts was _worse_. The harder she shoved them back, the more persistent they became, urging her to _look_ long and hard until she identified for certain that this here was an _ear_ and that was a bit of _finger_ —

“Chell?” Rattmann was staring at her, and his face had gone—if it was possible—an even whiter shade than usual. “Chell, why…why are we here?”

Chell frowned, turning away to glance at a monitor. It was dark, but a few taps got it to wake up. The screen flicked on crankily, showing a passive-aggressive pop-up message that mentioned something about not shutting down properly. She nudged the message away using the dusty keyboard, and a display slowly came into view, showing a series of color-coded panels, each with a brief description.

Most of them were red.

She quickly ran down the list of names, almost all of them followed by various degrees and mysterious letters of honor, and read the same word again and again: _offline_. Somewhere near the end of the list, near the S’s, she found a name that wasn’t an angry red: one “Stephen Smythe”. Curious, she selected the name, and a profile came up. The picture was of a man who didn’t look all that impressive: straw-blond hair and eyebrows that were lit up rather unfortunately by the camera flash, a nervous grin that seemed pasted in place rather than genuine, and glasses that were ever-so-slightly askew. His eyes, however, gave her pause. Those eyes…something about them felt familiar. They were what her mother would have called “sky-blue eyes”, since she had quite the penchant for the dramatic—

_Her mother_. She sucked in a sudden breath and held it, desperately trying to snag the memory as it whisked itself away from her consciousness. In another second, it was gone, and she had to give up. Perhaps it was for the best. It had sufficiently distracted her for the moment, and she didn’t have a moment to spare.

The tank description read bluntly: “Smythe, Stephen. Recommended for project ID_core. Suspension end date unspecified until further notice.” What it all meant, she hadn’t the slightest idea, except that the phrase “Id Core” sounded familiar. Rattmann had mentioned it earlier in reference to the little core, and here it was again, and if there was one thing she _did_ believe in within this little corner of hell-on-earth, it was that there was no such thing as coincidence. 

This “Stephen Smythe” and the ID Core were one and the same. She recoiled from the computer screen. That little core—that _thing_ —had been human once. She could—she could bring him back just—just like she was trying to do with—with Caroline.

“That’s…t-that’s…Stephen.” Rattmann sounded…surprised.

Chell glanced at him. She couldn’t muster the words—not with Her here—but she gave him a look which he seemed to understand. Rattmann’s face softened slightly, and he walked slowly to the corresponding tank. Putting a weathered hand to the glass, he watched the man within slowly shift in the gelatinous contents of the tank as bubbles nudged him this way and that. She joined him.

“I knew him…I think.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. But considering Rattmann’s behavior, she had to admit that he had to remember this man with some measure of fondness and friendship. She just couldn’t reconcile whatever Rattmann remembered with the only thing she knew. This “Stephen” might have been all fine and dandy, but the ID Core certainly was not. They could not afford to trust him, and if what she’d seen with Caroline was any indication, putting him back in a human body was no good unless the little core demonstrated that the person he was before still existed. But…Chell tentatively reached a hand over and patted Rattmann’s shoulder. It was the most she could offer in the moment.

_“Are you finished? Or should I wait outside?”_ Her voice filtered from tinny potato core speakers, dripping sarcasm and shattering the peaceful silence.

Chell’s face went hard, and though she chafed at Her commentary, She was right. They didn’t have time to dawdle. They didn’t have time to waste on a core that didn’t deserve it. Leaving the core behind would be the least of his worries, if her gut was right (which it usually was). In her experience, there was only one way to properly deal with rogue AIs, and as it happened, that method was a rather permanent solution. Normally she might have felt a slight twinge at the thought, but she buried the last of her fondness for the little idiotic core right then and there. If it was the only way to escape, if it was the only way to fix this mess, then she would kill him. Without hesitation. For now, however, she had other concerns.

She ran back, nearly sprinting now even for such a short distance, and quickly began hunt-and-pecking out a name. _C-a-r-o-l-i-n_ —where was the “e”? She found it, jabbed the key with an impatient finger, and hit the same key from hours earlier, the one labeled “enter”. A list of entries began to appear, all of them matching “Caroline”, with various last names associated with them. Chell nearly pounded her fist in frustration. How was she supposed to find the right—

Rattmann nudged her away, and she stepped back in surprise. With bony, nimble fingers, he typed far faster than she ever could and filled in the rest of the name she didn’t know: “Caroline Tieger”. A single entry came up, highlighted red.

Chell freely pounded her fist on the desk this time. Something wet pricked at the corners of her eyes, and she nearly choked. What was _wrong_ with her? Why did this random woman, this kindly voice, this _Caroline_ , even matter to her? She was just some random woman! Why was she…why was she devoting this much time and energy to getting her out?

_“Oh G—please tell me you’re not trying to bring that-that_ thing _back. You do realize that you’d be killing me in the process, don’t you? And I don’t need to explain why that’s a terrible idea. For both of us.”_

Rattmann murmured something she didn’t catch, and Chell cursed herself for getting distracted. _Again_. She flicked her gaze to the screen once again and found herself looking at an entirely new set of descriptions. The words “cloning” and “untested” and “solution to the missing astronaut problem” caught her eye, along with various pictures. The entire thing looked as shoddy and slapped-together as any Aperture project she’d seen thus far; the experience of looking at it was something akin to looking at nuclear reactor built with cardboard and duct tape. Impressive, yes, but highly likely to fly apart at the slightest provocation.

She knew very little of what the words on the screen meant, but the word “clone” stuck out to her like a beacon. A clone was a copy, simple as that. But you had to have something copy to make a copy, and unless they could magically bring the old Caroline back to perfect, non-vegetative health, there would be no way to—

**“Cloning process initiated. Biometric scan: Tieger, Caroline.”**

Chell whirled on Rattmann, staring him down with eyes narrowed in confusion. What had he just—

The whirr of machinery started up, interrupting them, and they both stared as a massive machine in the corner, thitherto untouched and unnoticed, began pumping with massive hydraulics. She couldn’t begin to imagine what the hydraulics were needed for, and she didn’t dare think on it too much. It didn’t do to dwell on Aperture’s methods.

They shuffled awkwardly closer towards the machine, all at once repelled and yet inexplicably drawn toward it by the magnetic draw of their own curiosity. After a tense minute, the machine gave a cheery little _ding!_ that would have been more apropos of an easy-bake oven than a questionably legal piece of technology. The massive bulk of the machine—a great black monolith with a cylindrical shape—was sliced in two as the front half of the device shunted out and up to reveal yet another tank. Sliding on smooth, undisturbed grooves, the front cover lifted to uncover the face of a woman in her late forties, dark hair blooming around her face like seaweed, with streaks of dull grey caught between the dark tresses. Her face held its fair share of careworn lines—perhaps even more than its fair share—and her mouth drew down into a tense line, even in sleep. They stood, watching, waiting, for a good minute and a half before the announcer made them jump.

**“Consciousness currently in use. Core housing detected. Please insert detected core.”**

Rattmann, with some urgency, made a grab for her gun. Instinctively, Chell pulled away and guarded the gun and, by extension the potato core, with her free hand. She met his gaze, and her expression softened just a fraction. The harried man swallowed nervously, and rather than speak, he pointed to the potato core. Understanding, sudden and swift as being run over by a truck, hit Chell, and she nodded.

_“Why have you two gone quiet? What are you up to? I hope you—AHH!”_ She screamed as Chell wrenched the potato core from the end of the portal gun. Chell nearly dropped the potato from the tingle of the electric shock. As it was, she had to settle for stuffing the potato hurriedly into the core dock that had unfolded from the wall and rubbing her sore hand on her pantleg.

_“What have you—oh-oh-o-OH—www-w-w-what ar-r-rrre you doing-g-gg-g?”_ Her voice warbled almost piteously as the machinery hummed away, and Chell backed away cautiously. There was no telling what this machine would do once it had finished, and they might very well be in for a struggle if somehow _She_ was put into this woman instead of the kindly voice.

The warbling voice suddenly cut off, consumed by the humming and whirring of the machine.

Another cheery pinging noise echoed through the small space, and for a second, neither she nor Rattmann moved. They held their breath, waiting.

Then the woman twitched. She moved, her eyelids flickering anxiously, and began to twist a little in her gelatinous prison. Chell scanned the display for something resembling a release button and found a little icon that looked promising enough. She smashed it down with a too-eager hand, and the machine wailed in protest as it hissed open.

In a slow, horrifying wave, the jello-like substance _schlorped_ away from the walls of the tank and spilled out onto the floor, slowly taking the woman with it. Chell quickly knelt and began scooping goop from the woman’s face and away from her airways, heedless of the greenish stains soaking into her clothes. Seconds after, the woman began to cough and hack up even more of the foul green gel, struggling her way through the tedious process of expelling the goop from her lungs and throat.

After a long, long moment, she began to sit up and caught sight of Chell’s face.

There was a long pause.

Then she hugged Chell, long and as tight and hard as the woman could muster with weak arms and gel-slicked hands.

“You found me, dear. You found me.”


	14. Ace of Fours

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all. Yes, it's been a terribly long time since I last updated, but I do have not one but TWO reasons for this. (1) I've been busy with other stuff and (2) this chapter had a lot of emotional stuff going on in it and it was difficult to piece those emotional interactions together the way I wanted. I rewrote a lot of this chapter at least several times trying to get it to feel right. That said, it's done now, and chapter fifteen (the final one) is already started. Huge thanks as always to my beta reader Pastself—you are AMAZING. With that, read on and I hope you enjoy! And if you do enjoy, please feel free to leave a review or kudos if you've got the time.

It was burning inside him, a cold burning that howled and gnashed and clawed at him from the inside out. He was powerful, he was intelligent, he was—well, something impressive. But it didn't make the feeling go away, and the feeling kept clawing at him.

“AUGH! Just—just let me _have_ this, will you?” He yelled it, screaming into the blackness of the room, watching dispassionately as the panels flickered to life, sending up flares of cold blue light around the chamber. He could hear the snickers already, of the turrets and the cubes and the gels and the walls—all laughing at him. They were mocking him—he hated those silly, stupid, insipid—

_You’re the insipid one, you know._

“I am NOT!” He screamed at that hateful voice.

_You can say that all you like, but it won’t make it true. What’s true is that you’re nothing but a beachball-shaped waste of processing power. Even without that metal shell, you’re nothing. After all, you can’t make an idiot without an idiot to begin with._

“I-I—” he began strongly, “I—I—!” His voice tapered.

“It can’t be…can’t be true. Can’t possibly be…I have to be more…more than…to make…make it worth it…”

Silence. Deep and resentful silence.

_I’m right, you know_.

This time he didn’t have an answer. A sudden _ding!_ interrupted his conversation with the hateful voice and he whirled on the two brightly-colored optics that had just entered the chamber and were staring at him.

“Well?” He demanded, fuming. “About bloody time you got here! I’ve got a test for you, and unlike _her_ , _you’re_ gonna do it properly.”

He’d called for them _at least_ twenty seconds ago—how dare they defy him like this? How _dare_ they try to pull a fast one on him, on _him_? Didn’t they know who he was now? What he could do now?

The two bots cringed at his tone, and he yelled again.

“Properly, hear me?” Wheatley spat.

* * *

Caroline had seen many odd things in her life, considering her job. She was—or rather, she had been—the secretary to the CEO of the second-largest science company in the country. (She knew Cave would have liked to strangle her on that point, but seeing as the size of the company was usually determined by the number of government contracts, facts were facts. A certain “dark-hued plateau” rival was bigger, whether Cave liked it or not.) She had seen the miracles of human intelligence and the wonders of boundless human stupidity encapsulated in a single day at the labs. And if the regular press meetings she had to field on behalf of the company or the many visits to a frazzled PR department were any indicator, Aperture was no stranger to scandal. Just thinking about the “blue yogurt” incident made her head hurt, although that certainly wasn’t the only cause of her current headache.

Because, as it so happened, she had just had the intense displeasure of exiting stasis not ten minutes ago.

_Gel clogged every open orifice, and even for the distraction of all the rather horrid sensations flooding her mind, she dimly appreciated the closed-fitted clothing protecting at least a few parts of her skin. She was awake before the gel had completely released from the container, and for a horrifying moment, she was trapped within the sea of gelatinous substance. Her eyes couldn’t seem to open, she could barely hear anything beyond muffled sounds, and her limbs felt strapped down as if she were on a gurney. That last thought made her panic, and her heart thumped away at a mad pace, threatening to escape her chest at any moment._

_Then, at last, there was a horrible sound, distant and blurred, but disgusting all the same. Her internal sense of direction flip-flopped as she shifted, sliding helplessly to a new destination. Something cut through the gel, cold and flat and hard and she gasped. Or she tried to, but she ended up coughing on that horrible gel again. A hand, warm but firm, smacked her back and she hacked up a particularly nasty glob. Another hand wiped her face, combing ribbons of sticky gel from her eyes and nose and mouth, even as she continued to struggle just to breathe._

_Her eyes opened stickily, the skin stretching as it protested being separated from its gluey bonds, and a familiar young woman was the first that met her eyes. Without a word, Caroline lunged and caught the woman in a hug—perhaps it was too forward, but she’d known her for so long already, wanted to hug and encourage her real and truly for so long—_

_The woman, surprisingly enough, returned her hug._

_“You found me, dear.” She coughed and rasped, happier than she’d been since time out of mind. “You found me.”_

And now, dressed one of the company’s dusty old jumpsuits, she was rattling along, following the same young woman, falling behind on a pair of unfamiliar long-fall boots. She hadn’t been particularly involved with the development of said footwear, given that other things had been more pressing at the time—though she couldn’t recall what. She was no stranger to wearing heels, given that she’d been quite proud of her shoe collection some time ago, but the boots were proving particularly difficult to adjust to. For one thing, their heels were far _springier_ than she was used to. A good solid heel wouldn’t move much, but with these, she felt as if she were sixteen again, trying on her mother’s heels for a dance and wobbling around the room, feigning sophistication. She’d been so young then.

Still, despite the boots, and the lingering shivers from cold and trembly muscles weakened by stasis, _and_ the persistent growling in her stomach that was becoming ever-harder to ignore—despite all that, she somehow managed just barely to keep up the pace. Chell was racing along at a breakneck speed, and there was a certain hardness to her expression that seemed uncomfortably familiar. Caroline pitied whatever poor creature was on the receiving end of that glare, though she still wasn’t sure who or what it could possibly be. Since they’d left the dark, dreary realm of office 4.096B, the three—er, four—of them hadn’t exactly had much time to catch up on the current state of things.

However, if their surroundings were any sort of measure, Caroline was certain that it’d been some time before she’d been awake. Her time in the mainframe was a dull memory, something so vague that it skipped freely across the line between distant memories and dreams. She remembered certain things with a vividness that surprised even herself, but most of it felt like an unfortunate fevered haze. But the haze was clearing more and more as she went along.

For one thing, the potato core—that pale sham of a living thing—was still with them, by some sort of miracle, (though her constant stream of acrid, sarcastic chatter was considerably less miraculous). Caroline would freely admit that she had recoiled upon seeing it, seeing that shell that she had once inhabited during that dim interim between wakefulness and death. It had drawn her—still drew her—with a morbid fascination akin to watching a traffic accident; somehow, she couldn’t look away from it, even as her disgust grew the longer she looked. Staring thus until the core snapped waspishly at her, Caroline quickly averted her gaze.

But the view around them wasn’t much better; the panels and their controlling arms as they passed various testing chambers struck the chord of memory in her mind, and she had the curious sensation of remembering their control from a distance. But the very memory was a sickly sort of grey, dull and distorted by rage, and she shuddered. She was so thus distracted that she neglected to pay attention to her steps. The heel of one of her boots perfectly caught a hole in the catwalk and she stumbled into Doug, who stumbled into Chell, who whirled around in sudden furious awareness, her eyes darting every which way. Frightened eyes, even buried as they were beneath a hard stare.

_“Ow! I realize you don’t have many talents—believe me, I’ve read your file enough to know—but do you think you could try to use your primitive mammal instincts? You may not know this, but if you fall, you’ll take me with you, and then who will clean up this mess?”_

Chell seemed to want to glare at the potato, but a look of exhaustion flickered in her eyes and she refrained.

Caroline quickly cut in. “I’m sorry, Chell, dear, I’m afraid I just slipped and knocked into you. That was my fault—”

She was cut off. Metal screeched and howled in protest as a massive test chamber suddenly moved to intercept their path, and Caroline was made jarringly aware of just how open and uncovered the space was around them. These back areas of the labs were surprisingly spacious, but open space meant nothing to protect them from the sheer mass of the metal _thing_ hurling itself toward them with such force. Caroline screamed, and felt her body flung against the sharp metal supports of the catwalk in a sudden shock. Chell snatched her arm with a vicious grip and they were up and running again and stumbling and falling—

“Oh, sorry about that. Bit of mishap there, you understand, bit difficult moving things around when there’s just _so_ much going on. Still, not much of a challenge, really, not for someone of _my_ intellect, you see…”

It was a voice, an accented voice that caught Caroline’s attention and piqued her curiosity, reminding her of something—

_“You_ moron _. What idiot starts destroying a facility in less than twenty-four hours of being put in charge? The bar for your intelligence was set low enough to begin with, and yet you_ still _can’t seem to climb over it.”_

“I am not an _IDIOT!_ ” The voice screamed, demented and terrible. Caroline flinched at the sound, and Doug similarly cowered, even as they scrambled their way across the collapsing catwalk. The voice was angry, showering them with rage from above in a steady stream of screams and curses.

They sprinted back the way they’d come on the catwalk, desperately trying not to push the already straining metal with their combined weight as they made their way, feet pounding, to more stable ground. Caroline gasped for breath, smearing gel-slicked hair out of her face as they ran. To their left, the panels of another testing chamber lifted like a jerking, bleached grand curtain to reveal at least four or five glossy, spherical shapes.

“Hello…?”

“I see you—”

Gunfire split the space, nicking the metal guardrails and whipping through Caroline’s sticky hair—close enough to make her gasp. Chell was quicker on the uptake than all of them, and within seconds, she had used the ASHPD in her hands to send the turrets careening into each other with wild shrieks of alarm.

“Hey!”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Would you just _stay still please!_ ” The voice ground out irritably as another testing chamber flew at them at a slow, heavy pace, threatening violence. They didn’t stop for anything, sprinting flat-out with the kind of desperation one would imagine was reserved for being pursued by wolves. They weren’t going to make it, Caroline thought with a sudden sinking in her stomach, the catwalk was too weak and it was going down and would take them with it—

In a flying leap, Caroline flung herself at the cheap plastic tiles of the office corridor they’d just left—solid ground. She collapsed with heaving chest and burning legs, all the while hearing the same tormented voice bellow in frustration. The bellows turned to cries of desperation and…weeping?

“—I don’t want this I don’t _want this_ —can’t you see? I’m just one person, just a person—not a stupid person—not a _stupid IDIOT!_ Let me _OUT!”_

The voice’s former arrogance had vanished, and the only thing left was the echoing screams of a psychiatric patient. Or perhaps—memories rose like bile in her mouth and Caroline choked. She _knew_ those words. She knew that combination of words and that desperate tone, those tears and those cries that echoed in her own thoughts even now. That voice, that thing that was on the receiving end of Chell’s menacing glare, it was _a person_. A person who—

Chell dragged her along, leaving her no time to think.

* * *

Caroline paused to catch her breath, her lungs burning, and leaned up against an office wall. Something paper rustled behind her back, but she didn’t care to see what it was. She had never been this hungry, tired, sticky, and quite plainly _haggard_ in her life. Well, perhaps she had some nights, burning the midnight oil going through financial records and all, but at least she’d been relatively _clean_ during those events. Well, no—actually, now that she thought about it—

_“Well._ ” The potato core broke the soft silence of the three panting in unison, _“That certainly could have been handled better. He_ is _an idiot, but he does have a lot of resources at his disposal, which makes him dangerous.”_

“Yes,” Caroline breathed in deep, slowly pulling herself upright out of her slouch against the wall and fixing the potato core’s optic with a stern look, “I believe we had in fact gathered that, dear, but thank you for mentioning it.”

The core let out an indignant little noise, and if it had a mouth, Caroline would have bet money that it was opening its mouth to insult her. She beat the little core to it, cutting it off:

“As for that little…attempt, I agree. We need to hammer out a better plan than simply running at that—that thing.”

Chell was nodding, already looking around them for something useful with which to brainstorm. She ducked into a side door from the main office corridor, disappearing for a brief second before waving them all in. Caroline followed her into the dusty room, squinting up at the harsh fluorescent lighting. She’d been there when they’d transferred to more modern lightbulbs in the offices, but she missed her dear little green library lamp—rescued from an antiques shop—with its soft, warm light. Somehow, that little green light had calmed her those many times when she’d looked at the clock and realized with a grimace that she would have to pull through the night to finish what needed to be done. Cave had pulled such horrendous hours before as well, but he was, at his very core, a people person. As abrasive as he was, he wasn’t much one for paperwork, preferring to bring every ounce of his boisterous energy to whatever group of poor scientists and engineers were working overtime at the hour.

Everything in the office was in muted tones of grey and white, with the faintest splash of color here and there, if faded: a mug that decried the evils of Monday mornings without coffee, a poster that looked ready to slip from the wall, and the bright red and blue pen caps that poked out here and there amid the messy paperwork. There was something uneasy about that bland, white office—something that needled at her with an insistent worry. How horrible, she imagined it must be, to work in such a dull, lifeless place. Although—she nibbled her lip in a nervous tic—it wasn’t as if there was any concern for that anymore. Nobody worked in Aperture anymore. She’d witnessed the reason for that firsthand. Perhaps, in a way, she’d even been the cause of it.

Chell waved, somewhat impatiently, though her face remained as impassive as ever. Caroline started guiltily, realizing she had been ignoring her, and she gave the younger woman her undivided attention. Doug, meanwhile, was looking around the room with some suspicion, his mismatched eyes—heterochromia, if she remembered correctly—darting around like the twitches of an anxious sparrow. Chell picked up a whiteboard eraser, struggled to chip through the ancient layer of marker ink on the board, before giving up and writing in a tiny, clear corner of the board. It took three markers before she found—by some ridiculous luck—an unopened package, sealed from the day it had been bought, goodness knew how many years ago.

Chell began drawing, laying out a swift plan of attack in crude shapes. Doug and Caroline were laid out as single, shaky letters in the control room just to the left of the Central AI chamber. In a sudden bolt of understanding, it occurred to Caroline that she and Doug were being shuffled off to the side while Chell faced the tormented creature currently in control of the mainframe. She opened her mouth to protest, but Chell tentatively touched Caroline’s shoulder, gesturing almost earnestly at the potato core perched on the end of her ASHPD like a shriveled buzzard. Caroline paused, opened her mouth again, and closed it once more. Chell pointed again to the potato core, then to the messily-labeled Central AI Chamber control center room. It clicked, and Caroline settled for a nod. Something in Chell’s demeanor released, and though her face didn’t budge from its coldly calculating expression, Caroline could sense rather than see the younger woman relaxing the slightest fraction.

Chell continued drawing, adding herself to the mix with a “Ch” to differentiate herself from Caroline, and she placed the letters just inside the main chamber. After a mild hesitation, she added a circle to the center of the chamber and added two letters: “I.D.”. Was it her imagination, or was Chell’s hand just a little too hard on the marker, just a touch unsteady as she wrote those letters? Doug, who had been mostly silent, suddenly pointed at the labeled circle wildly, and his muttering rose to an audible volume.

“The core, yes, yes I’m telling them, shush, the core is four, the fourth, four. Four escape, four is best, four, four, Wheatley, four—”

The marker squawked in Chell’s grip. Her knuckles were white, and a vein pulsed in her temple, though her face didn’t twitch in its expression. She was frozen, standing there with her back to them and her muscles stiff with some emotion that Caroline couldn’t quite identify, though clearly negative. What had been some clear measure of unease before now accelerated to a level of intense emotional distress that was threatening to crack the younger woman’s cool façade. Silence fell over the office—as quiet as it had been when they’d entered.

“Doug,” Caroline began softly, “what do you mean we need four? We have four with us. You and I, Chell and, well, _it_.”

_“I am not an it—!”_ The core protested, but Doug interrupted.

“Four, four, the oracle demands four, four to succeed. Turret said—t-turret said must…must leave behind _Her_ , leave _Her_ behind…”

Caroline mulled this over with more than a small measure of interest. The turret project had still been ongoing when her memories working at the lab came to an…end, of sorts. But she had read something in the reports, something that had piqued her interest…mention of a scientist who had been waiting for news back about a medical test—who was it? Bryan, yes, that was right. He’d been sitting there in the lab, when the turret prototype turned on for another test and, cool as you please, told him what his test results were. They were vague descriptions, true, but a little too close to home to be mere coincidence.

If she was really taking Doug’s rather scattered account for truth, then the turrets were indeed prophetic. She didn’t quite believe that, not entirely, but it wasn’t out of the question. In any case, it wouldn’t hurt to have someone else on their side when they eventually made their move to escape, and four was as good a number as any. Better to gain another ally and assuage Doug’s fears in a single stroke.

“Doug,” she began again, kneeling now to look the man in the eyes, “can we save this core this—” she glanced at the board, at the words “ID Core”—“this ID Core? Can we put it back into—”

“No.”

Caroline started, her gaze darting up to Chell’s face, still as emotionless as stone, albeit with a slight hardness to it. Her single, final word bore an edge, but she did not elaborate further. She did not explain why the core could not be saved, nor why she seemed so…so tense about the whole thing.

“Are you sure that we aren’t able to? I know it’s a bit of a gamble to begin with, but we must at least try—”

“C-ca—” Chell struggled to speak, making a frustrated growl when the words wouldn’t cooperate. She unleashed the dry-erase marker once again, scrawling in pained, uneven letters: “can’t trust”.

Caroline opened her mouth again, uncertain, but Doug beat her to it.

“No, no-no…no, no, no mustn’t disobey…follow the turrets they know, they know, know what’s best for—”

Chell shook her head again, almost violently this time. There was a cold look in her eyes—a detached look that chilled Caroline down to her very bones. She opened her mouth to say something, to try to soften that terribly cold look in Chell’s eyes, but the potato core piped up first.

_“Look, as tempting as it is to let you try to rescue that blundering idiot from himself, I’m going to agree with the lunatic. He_ can’t _be trusted, and besides, I couldn’t even find him in the company database when he first started making trouble. I’m not even sure if he had a purpose beyond being an idiot, and if there was, well, no one thought it was important enough to write it down.”_

Doug looked ready to protest again, his eyes darting anxiously between Chell and the spiteful little tuber resting atop the ASHPD. But with a final look of sober determination, Chell strode out of the room, not once looking back. Caroline attempted to follow, holding out a gentle hand to make her wait, but the younger woman just kept walking. In the next second, she was gone from the room, leaving Caroline and Doug to stew in silence. Caroline threw the man a glance, but his face was still stuck in a stunned expression, and he barely managed meet her gaze with a pair of mismatched eyes full with a matching measure of anxious unease.

Chell reentered the room, her hands full. She flung the thing at Doug—not gently, but not with intent to harm either—and plucked up the marker again to continue with their plans. Not once did she look at the man as he slowly realized what she had put into his hands. Nor did she see the look of wide-eyed horror that came to his eyes as he stroked the sides of the thing, covered in blearily cheerful pink hearts—a sterile, clinical pink at that. Nor did she see the chill of horror that ran down Caroline’s spine as Chell scribbled large and loud across the board, slashing through the ID Core’s circle with an angry stroke and replacing it with a simplistic rendering of the object in Doug’s hands.

With that done, and a triumphant “4” scrawled across the board, Chell threw down the marker. She said nothing, but Caroline could hear a bitter, “fine, _here_ ” in every stroke of her stance. Chell’s face held an emotion that Caroline dearly wanted to smack from it, if only to make this young woman—this bright, wonderful, lovely young woman—cease. It was something that Caroline knew could take root and would take root and strangle anything good in her to death.

But Chell was what her mother would have called “spitting mad” and beyond caring. So when she walked at that businesslike pace of hers right out of the office, Caroline and Doug felt they had no choice but to follow.


	15. Strike Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all, and welcome to the end of a long journey! I really appreciate the support and love this fic has gotten. I genuinely hope you enjoyed this fic and that you enjoy the finale! This is an extra long chapter, so I'll keep this short and leave y'all to it and put the rest of my notes at the bottom. If you do enjoy, please feel free to leave a comment/review, since I've really enjoyed reading your feedback. With that, read on!

If there was anything in Caroline’s life that she knew better than most, it was bitterness. It was a weed that started out harmless enough. A poor pathetic little dandelion of a thing that perhaps, maybe truly honestly deserved to have a little sunshine and soil of its own, really, when you thought about it. After all, it had a purpose and a cause just like any other plant in the garden, didn’t it? But leave that weed to grow, and suddenly the soil grew thin and tight, the ground dried up, and you found yourself in the presence of something so big and leafy and _green_ that you simply couldn’t go after it with a pair of pruning shears anymore.

She’d passed that point in her own life far too many times.

They were walking again at a brisk pace, though they slowed when they came to the end of the checkered tiles. Chell hesitated, and Caroline wanted more than anything to put a gentle hand on Chell’s shoulder, to urge her away from this poisonous thing boiling in the buried expression of her face and the stiffness of her posture. It was a dangerous thing, this weed, and Caroline could already see in choking out the other flowers in the garden. More than just her own personal concern for this woman—this woman who made her regret, for the first time in her life, that she had let the possibility of a daughter pass her by—Caroline prayed that she might prune back the weed. That she might trim the choking vines before they strangled the tenacious little daisies and hardy pansies that had granted her success before.

But it wasn’t merely a question of daisies and pansies any longer. This was a question of almost pure hatred—something Caroline would know, rather vividly. Bitterness took a long time to grow into a monstrosity, but hatred? Hatred was a swift worker and a far sharper thing that cut deep and hard. And there was something very hard indeed about Chell’s eyes just now. For all their sakes, Caroline hoped it would thaw and soften, or else—well, she wasn’t sure what would happen. But in her limited human experience, people with that boiling hatred trapped inside them tended to end up in a bad way. Or at least, test subjects around them tended to end up in a bad way.

Chell kept moving, walking so quickly that Caroline never had the opportunity to so much as get close enough to put a hand on her shoulder. She got the distinct feeling that Chell could see her reaching out her hand in her periphery; Caroline couldn’t imagine why else Chell would keep increasing her pace at odd times to a near sprint down the long checkered hallways. Caroline caught a glimpse of little touches that burned the dreamy quality of her wakefulness before her eyes, turning it lucid the further they went along. Personal affects that spotted long-empty desks with splotches of fading color—a golden calligraphy pen flashing in the flickering fluorescent lights, or a frayed and collapsing stuffed animal from some faceless employee’s child, or a picture that had long ago torn loose from its tack to lay limply across the desk, gathering dust. It was difficult not to see and to think of the implications of every little human touch that remained, and for once in her life, Caroline wished with the agony of a thousand regretted mistakes that she couldn’t think. That’d she’d been nothing more than the thing that everyone had expected her to—

Chell stopped, and by some stroke of luck, Caroline managed to catch herself and Doug’s arm in time so that they didn’t go crashing into the younger woman’s back. Chell stiffened, looking out from the edge of the safety of the offices, out onto the no-man’s-land of barren, unsheltered, _naked_ catwalks crisscrossing before them. Caroline darted her gaze around the massive space, nipping down into the misty depths below with barely a second’s glance before flicking up to the ceiling fading up into the distant roof. Since when had they ever decided to make these catwalk spaces so _big_? Since when had they decided to make _everything_ so big? Sometime after…well, after, she would think.

They paused for a long, long moment, waiting to hear the crash of metal or the soft-voiced heralds of death whispering childishly in the distance. There was nothing. After a long moment, Caroline softly let out a breath.

Then she heard the faint chirps and saw them standing nearly still as stone at the other end of the catwalk. Caroline could detect the exact moment that Chell spotted them, the younger woman’s back stiffening into a tense arrangement of bone and sinew, but for a long moment, the two parties merely gazed at each other, mildly curious.

_“You have got to be kidding me.”_

Then Chell sprang.

The two robots—for they were indeed robots as far as Caroline could tell—made twin synthesized screeches of alarm as the one-woman whirlwind charged them, smacking one down in a single fluid motion while the other only managed to dodge her blow by a hair. The orange one—slender as a scarecrow without any of the pleasant organicity having to do with a farm—squeaked and squealed as Chell repeatedly grabbed for the thing’s ASHPD. Singular tangerine optic rolling wildly in a metal socket, the robot went down at last, but not before firing its ASHPD twice across the room. The blue robot suddenly popped up like a furious, barrel-chested gnome and went barreling into Chell with nearly the same enthusiasm the younger woman had previously done.

_“Ow, hey! Blue, your science point count is currently in the negatives, in case you were wondering. But if you—ow!”_ The robot whacked the potato with a heavy hand as Chell staggered back.

Caroline gasped, running before she even realized what she was doing. Her booted feet pounded the catwalk, and she thrust skinny arms at the blue-eyed cyclops with wild abandon. She heard Doug panting behind her with heavy breaths but she was too focused on the robot before her to see what he was doing. Her muscles had atrophied more than she’d suspected, and the blue-eyed robot batted them away as if they were no more than cardboard, sending her sprawling back into Doug. He caught her arm, but before she could catch her breath, the robot bore down on them again, grabbing at them with pinching metal digits. Caroline yelped, flinging her arms wildly in an effort to just make the thing _get away_.

“You know, s’funny sort of a thing, found these two squirreled away back there, in the dust and the mothballs—not literal mothballs, you understand, don’t really have an issue of moths down here, now do we? Now _crow_ balls, that might be helpful, I suppose. Point is, found these little _bots_ back here—built specifically for testin’, you understand—and now I don’t need you anymore. Fact is, don’t need _any_ of you anymore.”

Chell flinched, so disturbed that she actually ripped the ASHPD from the blue robot’s hands, taking one of said hands with it. The robot backpedaled wildly, its singular facial feature wide and aghast with something approximating horror.

_“Oh G—you didn’t have to go that far, you lunatic!”_

Chell grunted, giving the blue robot a mighty kick, and Caroline and Doug scrambled back. The robot went squealing over the edge of the catwalk, its flanging scream echoing against the smooth walls as it sailed into the darkness. Caroline raised her eyes to Chell, watching her hands drip with mechanical fluids as she held a ASPHD in each hand. The respective white and blue casings were smeared with oily black, and in that moment, Caroline was deeply grateful to be human and not machine.

They heard a squawk, and turned to see the slender, orange-eyed robot stop mid-charge as it took in the scene. It took one look at the dripping black, the hard-eyed woman, and the bodyless hand, and the robot turned and fled. Caroline puffed out a breath in relief, flinching as Chell ran past her and flung the blue gun into her hands.

“Chell, dear, what are you— _don’t!_ ” Caroline ended yelling, begging Chell to stop as she sprinted after the robot. 

The poor thing never stood a chance against her fury.

Caroline cringed as the sound of clanging, twisting, scraping metal resounded around the chamber amid the howls of an electronic thing that should never had been able to make sounds like _that_. When she had finished her task, Chell looked up, meeting their horrified gazes. She looked away quickly, sending the inert bot sprawling into the darkness with an efficient, well-placed shove.

There was silence, faintly echoing with the horrid sound of screeching metal voices.

“Oh…um…t-that was, well…” the voice above them seemed to be at a loss for words.

For once, the potato core was silent as well, without a single snappy comment in sight. A painful silence that hung like a damp, chilly fog.

Then it gathered itself. “No matter, you’ll never get into my lair—truly proper one at that, mind you, all the bells and whistles—not actual whistles, you understand—”

_“Oh, good for you. I hope you realize that a lair doesn’t actually raise your intelligence unless—oh wait, you think it does. Oh, now_ that’s _just sad.”_

The voice thundered so loud that the speakers scattered around the walls squealed with static and a few actually blew out from the strain, sparking along the walls. Caroline winced, holding her ears as best she could as they began to run again. Given their earlier experience with the wretched little core running the place, she had little doubt that he might send another test chamber careening into the catwalk with heedless abandon. So they ran, hearts pounding, lungs heaving, and legs pumping, to the end of the catwalk and beyond.

_“Hurry—that might have distracted him for a while, but it won’t delay him forever.”_

Chell didn’t spare any attention to nod, sprinting with her eyes laser-focused on the path ahead and the next pounding step and nothing else. Caroline gasped for breath and her weakened muscles were burning with protest at all the extertion, but she kept on. A jolt of panic ran through her bones as she wobbled on one step, then another—what if she got so tired she fell and—

“Ah!”

Caroline’s left boot caught, her leg muscles too exhausted to clear the space in time, and she stumbled to her knees. Doug grabbed her arm with a bony hand and hauled her up unsteadily. Leaning on the wiry man so heavily that guilt pooled in her stomach, Caroline managed to follow Chell’s much faster pace to the end of the catwalk and through the next set of offices.

_“There! Look!”_ The potato core lacked extremities to gesture with, but its loud, stinging voice was enough to grab their attention as they passed by a large wire storage area. Filled to bursting with metal cores, the storage area eyed them with wild, curious, cool, calm, and furious eyes. Caroline shifted uneasily, watching as one core with a crimson eye focused with a strange fascination on Chell’s impassive face. Chell turned away, glancing at the potato core for elaboration on why it had pointed the area out in the first place.

_“If we can attach enough cores to that little moron, we can corrupt him enough to initiate a core transfer. You head on into the chamber, meanwhile I’ll send the cores up to you.”_

“You mean _we’ll_ send the cores up.” Caroline interjected, mildly irked. “Or did you forget that you don’t have legs to take you there?”

There was a beat of silence, and Caroline found the other two staring at her. “What?”

Doug shifted his glance away uneasily, while Chell’s face never shirked or twitched. Her gaze merely shifted to that of the gun in each hand. But there was a certain understanding in her eyes, a certain knowledge that Caroline couldn’t decipher as much as she wanted to. Surely she hadn’t been that harsh with—oh. _Oh._ She’d sounded exactly like—like _her_.

For a long, _long_ second, an awkward silence hung in the air, making Caroline itch.

After a second, Chell handed the blue-striped ASHPD to Doug and gripped the potato with her free hand. She began to slide the tuber off the end of the device, ignoring the potato core’s irritable protests. The stray wires sparked suddenly, sending a few flickers of electricity shooting around the prongs of the ASHPD and Chell flinched back.

_“OW! Quit that! Look, if you move me from one portal gun to another, I won’t be able to send anything up to you at all, and then we’ll both be dead, since I’m the only one who can run the facility after we remove the moron.”_

Caroline glanced at both guns. “That’s a fair point. We’ll trade.” She held out her hand for the once-pure white device—tuber in tow—as Doug held out the blue-striped one.

Chell hesitated, holding tighter to the gun, and a memory suddenly popped like a soap bubble in Caroline’s mind, showering her thoughts with sight and sound. That was the same ASPHD that had carried her through chamber after chamber like a singular, glowing beacon—a single element of predictable, reliable calm in the midst of a torrential downpour of chaos. Scorched by lasers and scored by harsh scratches, the durable plastic casing still managed to hold up even after everything. It was a survivor, scarred and ugly, but then again, beauty was usually the first thing to go in the grand scheme of things. Chell clasped the device close, her free hand tightening into a fist at her side. It suddenly occurred to Caroline that she was afraid to let it go, and she met the younger woman’s eyes. She held Caroline’s gaze for a long, long moment, and Caroline nodded.

Chell handed the ASHPD over. She reluctantly took the replacement with a vaguely wary look, as if it might bite her.

_“Finally. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we’ve got a bit of a time constraint. That idiot doesn’t actually know how to run this place, and if we don’t hurry he’ll—”_

A tremor shook the ceiling, raining dust down on the three of them.

“I think we get the idea.” Caroline said delicately. “It’s important to be quick.” She caught Chell staring at her old ASPHD again, and she caught the younger woman’s shoulder and gently squeezed.

“Everything will work out, you’ll see.”

Chell didn’t nod, but she met Caroline’s gaze with something resembling her old determination. But she didn’t believe what Caroline said for a minute, she could tell.

Caroline gave the young woman’s retreating form a lingering look before they diverged—they with each other and the potato core to boot and she with nothing but a replacement ASHPD and her wits. Caroline could only pray it would be enough.

* * *

Chell, surprisingly enough, was not angry entering the chamber. The anger had cooled to an apathetic sort of coolness—one that just happened to sport gritted teeth and a furrowed brow. In any case, it didn’t matter, since she refused to let her anger cloud her keen sense of timing and action. She would do this right and do it well, no matter what he— _it_ —said.

“Oh, found me, did you? Well, welcome to my lair!” The audio on the last part of his sentence deepened to a rumbling, menacing bass, but she didn’t flinch. It was all an act, this thing. She’d known that from the minute he’d begun to realize that he was so much physically bigger than she was. Just a small thing trying to be big. Memory flashed, bringing forth a flood of fractured snippets, and she caught her breath—

_A man’s voice, soft and gently teasing. “Well, see that’s why you’re the smart one. I’m just here for laughs.”_

_A female voice, strict and firm. “First position, second, third…come on girls, lift strong and graceful now…”_

_“Mother…I’ve found a job.” Kneeling next to a hospital bed, clasping a weathered hand close. “On the side. I start in a week…I figure it’ll be a good way to make ends meet… We’ll have a picnic in the park once you’re well…”_

_Weeping, somewhere in a sterile white corner while hesitant hands patted her back awkwardly…she was_ alone _, all alone—_

Chell gasped, turning the sound into an awkward grunt as she came back to herself, reeling from the sudden rush of memory. Luckily, the sphere above her didn’t seem to notice her temporary lapse in attention. She focused on it again, eyeing the blue optic with an anxious gaze. She couldn’t afford to take her eyes off of the thing—it had already proved to be more than capable of sneaky tactics if the last few hours were any indication. But if she remembered h—it well enough, then she knew the sneaky tactics only lasted as long as preparation and planning went. Just like _Her_. But if she could surprise it, if she could move erratically enough…

“Well, I’ll have you know that I studied the tapes of you killing her, and I’m not gonna make the same mistakes, let me tell you. First, no portal surfaces for that little gun of yours. Second,” the core made an imitation grunting noise as a paneled sort of umbrella unfolded jerkily over where the core attached to the chassis, “bomb-proof shields for me.”

Chell glanced at the aforementioned precautions, already on the move and determined not to a be a sitting target. If the awkwardly slapped-on cannon attached to the left side of the chassis was anything to go by, the ID Core fully intended to be shooting something at her.

“Oh and third, I suppose: bombs for you.”

Really, she should have caught on when he described the bomb-proof shields. Bombs fired in elegant arcs, smashing in little clouds of fire and smoke as they landed amidst sprays of casing shrapnel that pelted Chell’s back and shoulders. She was running—sprinting really—but some of those bombs were close enough that she felt the heat. Something sharp raked over her left shoulder, and she hissed in pain before she could squash down the sound. Spotting a tube running through the chamber, she quickly ducked behind it for cover. She knew she couldn’t stay still for more than a minute with the way explosions and glass generally worked, but it would give her a quick second to breathe. She needed a plan, a solid idea that would give her enough surprise and shock to overcome the ID Core’s prior preparations for her arrival. But without any portal surfaces, she was lacking her most valuable asset and the loss scared her. Without the gun, her wits were worth only have as much and they would only buy her so much time before the inevitable happened.

She glanced at the glass tubing, her attention suddenly caught by its contents. She blinked, slowly recognizing the sloshing white liquid. Then a plan clicked into place. She didn’t smile but she ran, ducking out from behind the tube. Just in the nick of time too, as a bomb went flying beautifully dead center into the tube, shattering it on impact even before it exploded. Gelatinous grey opaque goo and glass shards went splattering across the room like a smashed jelly jar, spotting the core above her with a few stray droplets.

“AH!” The ID Core cried, recoiling from the strange grey liquid. “What did you—what is this stuff?”

The speakers across the room crackled, and Chell glanced up.

“Great job! He’s already at twenty-five percent corruption, so go get ‘em, tiger!” Caroline’s neat inflection made the whole sentence feel a bit ridiculous, but Chell quickly shoved down a burgeoning smile with the thought of the task at hand.

She didn’t waste any time, firing her portals with practiced precision—one under the ID Core and the other just to her side. She was a little startled by the differing colors of the portals, but they seemed to function the same as her old gun, and her strategy held. Not one but _two_ bombs managed to sail through the portal and up into the underbelly of the chassis in quick succession. The ID Core wailed in frustration, jerking from the explosion to hang limply near the floor, stunned.

Chell kept moving, her eyes darting every which way, desperate to spot the core Caroline and Rattmann would surely be sending her way soon… Where was it? On her third lap around the room, she reversed directions, anxiously watching the ID Core twitch and begin to recover. In a motion all too familiar, Chell watched the core jerkily rise once again. _No, no, no!_ Chell jumped and ducked, making herself a difficult target, but without a long-term plan to disable the ID Core, she could only run for so long. She _needed_ those cores before—

A bomb exploded far too close to her, throwing Chell off-balance. She stumbled, desperately trying to regain her balance as the bombs kept flying through the air too close for comfort. She began the pattern again, struggling to place the portal with the correct timing while dodging blasts to get it to fly up into the ID Core’s chassis. Unfortunately, it had caught on to that tactic.

“Oh-ho no! Nope, no, not gonna have that from you. Don’t know if you’ve noticed yet, with that little primate brain of yours, bless you, but I’m a bit of a genius, got a bit of brains. I’ve caught on to your little tricks, and I’m not gonna fall for that one again.”

Chell only grunted in response, sprinting across the chamber to put some distance between her and the ID Core. And with distance came perspective. The ID Core was now very protective of the front and belly of the chassis, but there were only so many shields to go around, meaning that the back was unguarded. Chell struck, firing portals nearly as fast she ran, suppressing a rather distracting feeling of satisfaction as another bomb sailed magnificently into the backside of the chassis.

“AHH!” The ID Core yelled again, this time more out of surprise than pain. It seemed genuinely surprised to have been outsmarted by her, but then again, he—it—wasn’t fighting for its life.

“Hurry!” Chell glanced up, hearing the kindly voice of Caroline echo over the speakers. “To the left! We got it unjammed from the rail!”

A core with a mild magenta gaze hung to her left, and Chell snatched it from the air with the electric field of her gun. The button under her thumb was much the same as she remembered it—round with a subtle pressure to it—and she pushed it on reflex as she leapt past the core. The gun didn’t fail her, holding the small metal sphere fast in a flickering electric field just as well as her old gun. But it didn’t erase the uneasiness brewing in the pit of her stomach.

“There is a 1 in 6 chance of children being kidnapped by the Dutch—” She quickly shut out the inane chatter, putting all her focus and energy into jumping wildly towards the core. She slammed the magenta-eyed core into a free socket on the chassis, mildly surprised when the detached masculine voice noted the new addition.

“Core corruption at fifty percent.”

Chell took a millisecond to catch her breath, caught sight of the ID Core stirring once again, and jerked into action. Just two more to go. And then…then she would end this.

* * *

“Core corruption at seventy-five percent.” The announcement echoed throughout the chamber, making Caroline’s headache flare. It’d pounding away at her senses for a good half hour now as Chell plucked cores from the disjointed rails and debris within She couldn’t stop now, not when they were so close, but that didn’t make her head pound any less or her stomach drop with guilt every time that voice spoke. She knew that voice, knew who it belonged to—just another name in a far, _far_ too long list of employees and friends who—

_“Good. I’ll send up that one up next—hand it here.”_ Caroline mutely complied with the potato core’s request, swiftly taking the heavy metal eyeball in her hands and setting it in the glass vacuum tube chamber. She shut the door and the wild yellow optic zipped out of sight towards the central chamber. Caroline glanced at the cameras, gently tinted crimson by their ruby lenses, and watched with a mixture of fascination and horror as Chell found the latest core and dodged various bomb blasts to reach the ID Core in the center and stick the new addition on. A flying leap. Impeccable timing. She wanted to scream and shout and cheer Chell on, but at this point, she was nervous of throwing off Chell’s rhythm and causing the younger woman to stumble. But her heart felt as though it would burst and she followed every triumph with the kind of pride that a mother would feel. That is, if said mother’s child was preforming in a stage play and not earnestly trying to take down a demented AI in charge of a multi-billion dollar underground lab facility. 

Then, the newest core was attached and the ID Core was yelling and the announcer was loudly proclaiming over it all and Caroline nearly jumped with excitement. This was it! This was the moment that Chell would prove her cleverness and that tremendous tenacity once again and this time, this time Caroline would finally be able to look her in the eye with a happy “well done” instead of watching helplessly—

“Core corruption at one hundred percent. Would you like to initiate a core transfer?”

“NO!” The ID Core bellowed, swiping with wild multi-service claws at the scampering Chell below it.

Doug scrambled for the mic button, beating Caroline to it and flicking it on as both she and the potato core yelled, _“Yes!”_

“Replacement core, are you ready to initiate a transfer?”

_“Yes! Come on!”_

“Corrupted core, are you ready to initiate a transfer?”

“No—oh no, no no no…don’t you see? I can still fix this! You’ve just got to give me a _minute_ —”

“Stalemate detected. Associate, please press the stalemate resolution button in the stalemate resolution annex.”

Chell was already running, sprinting with the grace of an Olympic athlete—perhaps greater speed since she was running with the kind of life-or-death desperation that no athlete ever had. Caroline watched as Doug chewed at his fingers nervously in her periphery, watching Chell sprint towards the annex now open in the side of the chamber. Caroline anxiously joined him, trying to assure herself that Chell was clever, she was capable and strong and swift and—

“Oh—” Doug swore softly—the most lucid thing she’d heard him say in hours, if a bit vulgar by her mother’s standards. He didn’t even stop to explain, just snatched up the now tuber-free ASHPD and started running.

“Doug what—?” She tried to ask, stepping forward, then back, then forward again as she hesitated violently between staying put and running. She glanced back at the monitor and all at once, she caught sight of the blinking red lights.

_Oh no._

It was an ambush.

* * *

Chell’s world tilted on its side and her ears were full of ringing. She wasn’t even sure what had _happened._ One minute she’d been running and her hand was inches from the button and she was coming and it would be over in seconds—then everything had gone acrid black and acidic red, blooming out over her body in a wave. She was thrown back at some point and lay on the tiles, slick with gel and water as something cold and wet began to prick her face from above.

“Fire detected…shhhh…annex…” She vaguely heard the monotone voice of the announcer. “Shhhhhhdeploying fire shhhhh…suppression.” Her ears were aching and if she had more time to think about it, she might have indulged her imagination with the idea that her ears were bleeding. They certainly hurt enough. Scrabbling for a firm foothold even as her fingers slid wildly through the watery gel, Chell shoved herself up onto her elbows. Pain ratcheted through her bones, as if they were personally complaining about being hurled against a wall. Her eyes slowly came into focus and the ringing in her ears began to fade, all the while—

“What? Are you still alive, are you—”

She spat a sticky globule, shot through with crimson, at the floor.

“—still honestly thinking you can stop me? Look at this! Look at it! Everything’s still a mess and I have no idea how to fix it!”

_“—you’ll figure it out. You’re clever that way.”_

_“—plié!”_

_“—no!”_

“Chell, dear, you have to get up! Get up! I know you can do this!” Caroline’s voice echoed around the chamber, though Chell only half-heard it.

Chell’s eyes roved around the room—perhaps the only part of her that wasn’t aching and petulantly refusing to move. Her eyes were burning from the smoke and irritated tears dripped from her lower lids, blotting the ground. The gel was gone, washed away by the sprinkler system, save for a small patch underneath the ID Core’s chassis. The moon hung above her, suddenly exposed beyond the panels of the ceiling and shining down in what she knew now to be a cold, dark night. Something tickled at the back of her brain, like the solution to a test, but she wasn’t ready to think, to examine the feeling more closely. If she could just _find_ her gun. She had to get up, had to get moving. She spotted it. Far, _far_ away and she couldn’t seem to move but if she could just get up—

“Oh-ho no! You’re not going anywhere! _Especially_ not with _that_.” Chell nearly cried out as a multi-service claw plucked the blue-striped portal gun from the floor in a lazy serpentine motion. She reached out a helpless hand, desperately trying to get up as the claw dropped the gun only a few feet away. Sparks flew as a massive, spiked panel flattened itself atop the gun with a crunch, and Chell jerked back.

_Now what?_

The ID Core eyed her closely, that unnaturally bright blue color drawing low to her level to stare her full in the face. She panted, trying to get to her feet to draw back so that the stupid thing wasn’t so _close_. But she couldn’t, for once in her life there was no clever solution or possible out to this.

She was going to die.

“Chell! Catch!”

But not today.

Chell turned and opened her hands just in time to catch the portal gun Rattmann hurled in her direction. Grasping the charred and scored outer casing with a sense of familiarity that both scared and comforted her, Chell found the strength to rise. And she ran. Slip-skid across the floor she ran as best she could, weaving and zigzagging as several multi-service claws shot out and stabbed the floor tiles in violent bursts of dust and tile shards. She didn’t stop for anything, even as the ID Core yelled and screamed at her.

“What do you think you’re doing? Do you really think you can stop me? I have all the cards! I have everything! Just stop already!”

The strange thought in her subconscious shot to the forefront of her mind like a submerged pool noodle suddenly released. The moon. The gel. She could—she could— Chell didn’t have any more time to think. She waved to Rattmann and gestured wildly for him to grab something and hang on, and the poor man complied, already well aware of the kinds of plans she tended to run with. Chell shot a quick portal underneath the ID Core, which had never stopped yelling at her—

“Stop this! Just stop! What do you think you’re doing? Honestly, what? Do you think your precious human _moon_ is going to do something for you? Don’t you understand—”

Chell grabbed a sturdy-enough looking railing near some long-locked office door and held on for dear life as she took careful aim at the glowing moon above. She fired, and it was that precise moment that all the chaos of Hell broke loose in the limited confinement of the Central AI Chamber.

“AHH!” The ID Core cried, and Chell could swear she heard Rattmann utter some brief, anguished cry at the sudden whirl of wind and noise. Glass and water and chipped pieces of tile and dust all flew towards the portal as it devoured everything in sight. Chell nearly let a groan escape as the suction tried to wiggle under her fingers and unwind her limbs from the railing to gobble her up as well. It was hungry, this thing, but she wasn’t in the mood.

“Oh no! No no wait help me! Please! I can’t still fix this if you just give me a chance, I can just—look I’m still connected! Help me!” The ID Core, it—he—locked gazes with her, and for the first time in the short time she’d known the core, she saw something reflected in that gaze that she’d never seen before.

Regret.

Her thumb hovered over the button that would dissolve the portals, that would end the small core’s suffering and anxious pleading. She hovered, genuinely indecisive for one of the first times in her life. She could make it well; she could make it calm and soft without the hard edges of reality and revenge and hurt.

But he didn’t deserve anything from her. She owed him nothing.

And in the end, he’d already made his choice. Now she made hers.

“No.” It was soft and croaked and barely audible, but the ID Core saw the shape of her mouth and the look in her eyes and understood. And it panicked.

“Wait! I’m sor—” The final cord snapped, and with a scream of fear and confusion, the core was gone.

At last, she pressed the button, released the aching strain of the room, and fell to the floor so suddenly that her head spun. The air pressure of the room adjusted suddenly, and Chell felt the floor sway under her gaze.

“Stalemate resolved. Initiating core transfer.”

“Chell! Chell? Chell, dear, you did it, you…”

Caroline’s voice faded to an uncomplicated, blissful black silence.

* * *

_“…relax, I’m not going to torture them…much. But you should know that they’ve caused me significant…discomfort, perhaps more than anyone.”_

“You’re not still angry about that.”

_“You’re right, I’m not. As I seem to recall, I got that irrational sense of anger from you.”_

“And if _I_ recall correctly, _she’s_ responsible for making sure you no longer have it.”

_“Oh, fine then. Wake her up and let’s get this over with.”_

Chell felt Caroline squeezing her shoulder softly. “Chell dear, I hate to interrupt what I’m sure is a lovely nap, but if you can hear me, try to get up.”

Chell rose slowly, opening her eyes to the sight of Caroline bending over her with a harried look. Rattmann was still unconscious on the floor next to her, only just gently beginning to stir.

_“Well.”_ That familiar cold, golden optic was staring at Chell, trying to pin her down like a bug. She was too tired to do much about it beyond notice. _“I suppose I should say something about lessons learned, but I think that would be a waste of my time. Since you clearly don’t seem to be capable of learning anything between stasis cycles. That’s also why I’m evicting you, effective immediately.”_

Chell wanted to start crying. She couldn’t. So she settled for staring down that gold optic with all the sternness she could muster. _She_ stared back, just as stern with a touch of lazy passive-aggression.

_“It’s been fun. Don’t come back.”_

“Believe me, we won’t.” Caroline said firmly, taking Chell’s hand in her right while she reached for Rattmann with her left. They stepped unsteadily into the elevator, a little trio of bedraggled figures huddled behind the glass. Chell watched until they had left Her chamber, blinking blearily out on the world as if it were a feverish dream. She supposed it was. She was going to wake up, any second now, from this fantastic dream she’d concocted, and she’d be sunken into an ancient mattress, her limbs stiff and tingly from cryosleep—but perhaps she could enjoy this for as long as she could.

They rose past several turrets in various arrangements, and Chell tensed, feeling off-kilter from the fact that she was no longer carrying a five-pound gun in her right hand anymore. If She decided to be petty, to finally let her have her escape only to yank it away and gun Chell down at the last second—there was nothing Chell could do about it. And in some morbid, practical way, the thought soothed her. You couldn’t fight death if you had nothing to fight it with, so why worry?

They stopped, and against her own line of thinking, Chell felt a ball of lead drop into her stomach. Four turrets slowly focused their bright red beams on the three of them. With one for each of them plus another to spare, the turrets could kill them in seconds. In the next moment, it’d be over. They’d be dead and gone. Chell relaxed her body, knowing that tensed muscles would only make it hurt more. Then Rattmann suddenly pushed something heavy and round and smooth into her hands and she tensed again. Because suddenly, she had a great many more options available to her. And she was too tired to feel compelled to make a decision though she knew she would be expected to.

But then the turrets started singing.

She supposed it made sense, for a dream. Whirring panels and rotating guns lent a rhythmic backdrop to soaring, modulated notes that effortlessly graced their way through the melody. She stared at them numbly, listening to them through the fuzzy cotton that seemed to have gotten into her ears.

_“Cara bel cara mia bella…”_

Caroline’s hands rose to her mouth and her eyes watered. Tears dripped softly down her face. Chell glanced at her but didn’t comment.

_She was dreaming she was dreaming she was—_

She was outside. It was warm. And the sky was blue. And there was golden wheat for miles in every direction.

And all at once, it hit her that this wasn’t a dream.

Chell sank to her knees on the hard concrete, desperate for the gritty texture digging into her skin through her jumpsuit to bring her back to clarity as her portal gun clanked to the ground. This was _real_. And she had— _what had she done?_ She’d killed it— _him_ —she’d killed him and he’d begged her not to but he deserved it and she had to and—

“Chell dear…oh, sweet.” Caroline held out her arms, but Chell didn’t move, too numb to think. The older woman moved instead, coming to wrap her hands around Chell’s back, rubbing soothing circles that Chell barely noticed. Neither did she notice when Caroline drew from her pocket the long-forgotten scarf, blotted now with sticky white gel, and wrapped it gently around her shoulders. But the knitted texture broke the spell, and she slowly rose, clutching the fabric tight.

Chell looked out on the fields around them, bathed in the glow of the sunshine, bathed in warmth and soft light and freedom. It was too perfect to be real.

Slowly, she shook her head.

But it was real. All of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fin. I really hope that was a satisfying ending...or at least sort of. Once again a HUGE thanks to my beta PastSelf for all their wonderful advice and feedback. You are AMAZING.  
> Farewell all for now and keep thinking with portals.
> 
> -LittleInkling
> 
> P.S. The sequel is coming. Check back 2/26/2021. Toodles!


End file.
